Auditing Internal Linking with Sitebulb

Internal linking is key in allowing both users and search engines to navigate your website and find key pages successfully. A good internal linking structure is also necessary to distribute authority and establish a clear hierarchy for your pages.

Follow this article for step-by-step guidance on how to analyse your internal linking with Sitebulb and find opportunities for improvement.

Find key links data in Sitebulb within the following areas of your Audit:

Start your internal linking audit by navigating to the Links Report. Here, you’ll find all the linking data collected by Sitebulb, organised in graphics and tables to help you quickly gain insights into the status of your internal linking.

First, to find broken and redirected internal URLs, scroll down within the Links Report to find the Links Status tables.

Within the Internal Links Status table, you’ll find listed the broken and redirected link metrics. Click on the metrics to navigate to a list of all redirected or broken links within the Link Explorer.

Alternatively, you can find this data by navigating to the Link Explorer, where all URL data collected by Sitebulb can be found in bulk.

Use the top menu to navigate through pre-filtered URL lists of your Internal links, including Redirected, Not Found, and Error Internal links.

To improve crawl efficiency and load speed, you may also want to address redirect chains. Sitebulb collects your chained redirects in a dedicated file, which can be exported to CVS or Google Sheets for analysis. To export this file, navigate to the Redirect report and find the green ‘Export Redirect Chains' button at the top of the screen.

Once you have addressed pressing issues with broken and redirected URLs, it’s time to review the existing successful internal links for optimisation opportunities. First, ensure that your key pages are well-linked internally.

Sitebulb collects and reports on the number of Internal Linking URLs for each of your pages. You’ll find this data laid out in the top ‘Incoming Internal Followed Links’ graph within the Links report - visualizing the link distribution across different link ranges.

As a matter of priority, review the pages flagged as having very low or zero internal followed links. You can jump into this list by clicking on the relevant chart bar.

Your key pages should be well-linked internally, so you would generally expect to find them in the higher end (right side) of this graph.

For more on this, check out our dedicated article on how to find internal link optimisation opportunities with Sitebulb.

As it builds your Audits, Sitebulb takes into account the incoming internal links to each of your URLs to calculate the URL Rank metric.

URL Rank, or UR, is a measurement of internal page strength based on relative link weight, where only internal links are considered for the calculation. Pages that have a lot of internal links end up with a higher URL Rank, while pages with very few internal links end up with a low URL Rank. The URL Rank metric ranges from 0 (no incoming links) to 100.

To find this data, navigate to a list of your Internal URLs and look for the UR Data Column.

Analysing the URL Rank of your key pages is a great way to find new opportunities for internal linking optimisation. You can expect your key pages to be well-linked internally, so their UR should be close to 100. Any important pages with a low UR score should be reviewed.

As part of your internal linking audit, you may want to check whether your key pages are easily findable and accessible from your homepage or start URL.

When using ‘Crawl Website’ as your crawl source, Sitebulb discovers new pages by following the internal links found on each page. Each page will be assigned a Crawl Depth level depending on how many ‘hops’ or links Sitebulb followed to discover the page, beginning from the start URL.

Your start URL (usually the homepage) is Crawl Depth 0, every page found through links on the start URL is Crawl Depth 1, and so on.

The distribution of URLs by crawl depth is outlined in the Crawled URLs by Depth graph on the Internal Report.

You can also find this data by viewing your Internal URLs list and analysing the data in the Crawl Depth column.

The linking relationship between your pages is also represented in Sitebulb’s Site Visualisations.

The Crawl Maps, in particular, is a visual representation of the first link to each page found by Sitebulb while crawling. This feature provides a helpful visualisation of crawl depth.

Anchor text is one of the key data points Sitebulb reports for each link. Links report hints can help you quickly and efficiently identify opportunities for optimising your anchor text. Specifically, look for pages flagging the following Links Hints:

Alternatively, find all anchor text data in bulk in the Link Explorer.

Within the Link Explorer, you have the option to analyze and review the anchor text of your pages using the search and filter features.

Type any URL in the search bar to view all incoming links to that Target URL and analyse the anchor text of these links.

You can also click on any Anchor Text element to jump into a list of all links using that specific work or string as anchor text and analyse for keyword cannibalisation.

To ensure that your website has a customised 404, you will need to carry out a manual check. However, Sitebulb lets you go further by automatically carrying out tests to understand how the website reacts to requests for different URLs that do not exist.

This allows you to find gaps in the implementation and ensure that users are always directed to an adequate error message if they land on the wrong URL on your domain.

To find this data, navigate to the SEO Report and view the Not Found (404) Test Results table.

Pages that may trigger a soft 404 will be flagged under the following Indexability Hint:

For security purposes, you will want to ensure that all of your internal links point to the secure version of your pages.

Sitebulb flags up pages containing links to HTTP URLs under the Links Hint:

To ensure that preferred version redirect rules are correctly implemented on your website server, navigate to the SEO Report and find the Domain Resolution Test Results table.

Sitebulb tests each variation of the common preferred domain setup structures to ensure that they redirect, and alerts you if more than one of these is crawlable.

You will also find data about any broken and redirected external links in the Links report.

The External Links Status table is adjacent to your Internal Links Status table. Here, you’ll find listed the broken and redirected external link metrics. Click on the metrics to navigate to a list of all redirected or broken links within the Link Explorer.

This report will only be available if the External Links Report setting is enabled under Advanced Search Engine Optimisation Settings (enabled by default).

We have a whole article dedicated to how to find orphaned pages on your website. Here is a summary of the key steps to help you identify orphan pages in your Audit.

First, you will need to set up your audit to allow you to find as many of your Internal pages as possible. To find orphan pages, you need to compare crawl data with other URL sources.

Once your audit is complete, navigate to the Audit Overview and analyse the HTML URL Sources section.

Review the breakdown to understand where your URLs were found. You will want to pay particular attention to the orange column, which visualises the URLs that were only found through a specific source.

Pages that were found only through GA, GSC XML Sitemaps, or the URL lists, but not in the crawler’s internal link map, are considered orphan pages. They could not be reached through internal links from your start URL.

Orphaned URLs will also be identified in the Indexability report, under the hint

This Article works in conjunction with Sitebulb's Technical SEO Auditing template. Continue your technical SEO auditing journey by following the step-by-step articles below.