How to find the pages with the weakest internal linking

JetOctopus has analyzed many large ecommerce websites, and we can say with certainty that internal linking is critically important. If you want your website to be indexed by search engines, you need to pay attention to clear navigation and avoid too deep website internal structure. Read about it in the following articles:

What is DFI (distance from index) and how to analyze it

Internal Links For SEO: The Comprehensive Guide.

In the current article, we will tell you how to find pages with the weakest internal linking and how to fix it.

Analysis of pages with low number of internal links

Internal links are those that have the same domain as your website and are located in the code of your website. For example, for the https://domain.com website, internal links will be all URLs in the website code that have the following structure:<a href=”https://domain.com/page“>Anchor</a>.

Please note that internal links that are not located inside the <a href=> HTML element are not taken into account by search engines during scanning and determining link equity. That is why you will not find internal links in the crawl results, which are, for example, a button without <a href=>.

To find pages with the weakest internal linking, start a new crawl or select one of the recent crawls.

Wait for the crawl to complete. While crawling is processing, we recommend reading an article about why partial crawling is not a good option for your website. One of the reasons is the inability to detect pages that really have a critically low number of internal links.

Go to the crawl results and select the “Link Overview” dashboard.

Here you will find general information about pages with weak internal linking. In “Links problems list” you can see two items: “Only 1 inlink” and “Less 10 inlink”. Click on the number next to the problem to go to the data table.

In the “Pages” dataset, you can analyze URLs with any number of internal links. Select the filter “Count of In Links All” – “< Less than” and the number you need.

In the “Links Overview” dashboard, the “Pages by count of” chart is really interesting. Here you can see the distribution of all pages of your website by the number of internal links. All chart columns are clickable.

To bulk export a dataset with URLs with a low number of inlinks, click the “Export” button in the data table and select the desired format.

What to pay attention to when analyzing pages with the weakest internal linking

We recommend that you dive deeper into the analysis of pages with a low number of internal links.

1. What is the ratio between the number of internal links pointing to the page and the search results?
2. How many clicks and impressions do URLs with 10 internal links have?
3. What is the ratio between the frequency of scanning by search engines and the number of inlinks?
4. Are there any pages in the SERP that have less than 5 or only 1 internal link?

Only using such an analysis, you will find the critical number of internal links needed for the page to be indexed and have traffic. However, JetOctopus has analyzed many websites, and we can say that in most cases 10 inlinks will not be enough for quick indexing, and if a page has only 1 inlink, then this is a critical case.

You can analyze all these points with JetOctopus. To do this, use segments in dashboards.

More information: How to use segments.

You can also join datasets in data tables.

More information: How to join datasets.

You can find all internal links pointing to the desired page using the “Linking Explorer” tool.