Internal links are the plumbing of your site. They tell search engines what
matters, spread ranking signals between pages, and — more practically — they
are the single biggest free lever most sites ignore. Here are five checks
you can run right now with free tools.
1. Find orphan pages
Any page with zero internal links pointing to it is an orphan. It might be
indexed (if an external link found it), but it's getting no internal signal,
and it's invisible to your own navigation.
The check: crawl your site and diff the discovered URLs against your
sitemap/CMS export. Every URL in the export that the crawl never saw is an
orphan. RankForge's free crawler does the diff for you
in one step.
2. Count how many pages have no internal links at all
A page that's linked only from the sitemap is a de-facto orphan. Filter your
crawl for pages whose internal backlink count is zero, and you'll usually find
a mix of old articles, staging pages, and forgotten product pages.
3. Check your homepage's link budget
How many links does your homepage actually carry? A homepage bloated with
hundreds of links (footer, mega-menu, "as seen on" badges, social icons)
dilutes the signal it sends to your most important pages. If your money pages
aren't in the top 20 links from the homepage, that's a signal problem.
4. Find pages nobody links to with relevant anchor text
Anchor text matters. A page that only ever receives "click here" and "read
more" anchors is telling search engines nothing about its topic. Find pages
whose internal anchors are generic, and add one or two descriptive, contextual
links from related content. Natural anchors like "orphan page checker" or
"free SEO tools" tell both users and engines what the target is about.
5. Verify your pillars actually point at each other
If you use topic clusters, your pillar page should link to every cluster page,
and (ideally) cluster pages should link back to the pillar. A quick crawl
shows you which cluster members drifted out of the hub-and-spoke structure.
Why this matters more than new content
Most sites don't need more pages — they need their existing pages to work
together. Fixing internal linking is:
- Free — no ad spend, no tool licenses
- Fast — most fixes are adding one contextual link
- Compounding — every fix improves how the whole site passes signal
Run these five checks once a month. In two or three cycles, the pattern of
links between your pages will look like a site someone actually maintains —
which is exactly what it should look like.
All five checks above are built into RankForge's free suite — crawler, orphan finder, and internal-link checker, no signup required.
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