Link Analyzer

How this internal link checker works

A link analyzer shows you what Google already sees: your link structure tells it which pages you care about. Google uses links to find new pages and as a relevance signal, and its own docs say every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. A page with zero internal links can still turn up through your sitemap, but the rest of your site does nothing for it. That's why a quick link audit can reveal problems that no amount of content optimization will fix.

Single page mode extracts every <a href> and sorts them: internal vs. external, followed vs. nofollow, plus sponsored and ugc. It also reads the anchor text instead of just printing it, so a generic "click here" or one URL carrying four different labels comes back as a finding. Whole site mode crawls your sitemap and counts, for every page, how many other pages link to it.

How to use a link analyzer for SEO

Run Whole site first. Two numbers matter. Orphans are pages in your sitemap that no other crawled page links to, and they are the emergency: a reader has no path to them at all. Nav-only is the quieter problem. Those pages are linked, sometimes fifty times over, but every one of those links sits in a menu or a footer. Boilerplate carries almost no topical signal, so a page with fifty menu links and nothing from an article body is close to invisible in your own content graph.

Then run Single page on whatever you are about to publish. The anchor audit catches the two habits that waste an internal link: a label like "read more" that tells Google nothing about where it goes, and the same URL linked three times under three different names.

Finding broken links with a link analyzer

Two problems at once. Users hit a 404 and bounce. And an internal link to a dead URL is a path that leads nowhere, for readers and for Google. This tool does the first half of that job. It pulls every link off the page and groups them, so you get the complete outbound list in one place. What it does not do is request each URL, so it cannot tell you which ones are dead. For that, send the same page through the Broken Link Checker, which fires a real HTTP request per link and reports the status code. Fix the high-traffic ones first. A 301 to a live page beats deleting the link.

Link analyzer vs. Google Search Console

Search Console's Links report does count inbound internal links, and across more pages than a 250-page crawl reaches. Two things it will not tell you. It lags behind your current state, because it reports what Google crawled rather than what is live right now. And it counts every link the same, so it cannot separate a link in an article from a link in your footer. That separation is the whole point of the Nav-only column here.

Reachability is the trade. This tool sees whatever a crawler sees: a public staging domain works, anything behind a login, an IP allowlist or basic auth does not. Use Search Console for the macro view, and this for a current, section-aware read.

How accurate is this link analyzer?

Worth being precise about, because most tools are not. Inbound counts are built from the pages you crawled and nothing else. Crawl 50 of 800 URLs and a page linked only from the other 750 will show up as an orphan. The scope line above the tables says how many pages the numbers cover, and it is the first thing to read.

Site mode reads the raw server HTML rather than rendering each page in a browser, which is what keeps a 250-page crawl to a couple of minutes. Links injected by JavaScript after load will be missed. Single page mode does render, so if you want to know whether a link exists at all, check it there.

Section detection is a heuristic. Landmark elements and ARIA roles are exact; past that the tool matches common container names like mobile-menu or site-footer, because plenty of real menus are plain divs. A menu with an unusual class name will be counted as body content, which understates the Nav-only list rather than inflating it.

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