Whether you’ve just completed a site migration or are linking to improve the performance of your current site, there are a lot of checks and balances you need to complete in order to ensure you’re providing a great user experience for site visitors. One of these important checks is to locate and verify all your internal links.
Internal links are an essential element of your website. They not only help users easily navigate between one page of the content to the next, but they’re actually really helpful for telling Google how its crawlers should map out your site structure when indexing your pages.
Unfortunately, though, finding all your internal links isn’t always easy, especially if you have multiple pages of content that have accrued over the years. In this guide, we’ll break down some of the most common ways to locate your internal links.
Do a Manual Checkup
While not always the most efficient method for verifying internal website links, a manual checkup is often preferred when you also want to check multiple elements of your site to make sure everything is working correctly.
This method requires you to either navigate to your main site through a browser or log in to your CMS. As you look through each of your published pages, make a note of every time you notice a hyperlinked piece of content. When you hover your mouse over a working link, you’ll notice a URL preview in the bottom left of your screen.
Another way to manually check for internal links is to use your web browser’s developer tools. Whenever you’re on one of your webpages where you suspect you may have some hidden internal link, right-click your mouse and click “Inspect.”
Once the developer console is open, navigate to the “Elements” tab and use the search function on your browser (Ctrl+F). Search for the anchor tag “<a>” or attribute “href,” which will show you each link on the page.
Find Internal Links in Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is another helpful way to locate the internal links on your pages. This is a free tool that you can use whenever you want to run a site audit.
To get started, you’ll first need to navigate to GSC and log in to your Google account. Once logged in, if you’ve multiple websites linked, you’ll need to choose the one you’re auditing.
Navigate to the “Links” report found in the navigation window on the left-hand side. Inside your Links report, you’ll find a section titled “Internal links.” This will show a list of top-linked pages and the page source they come from.
Use a Spider to Find Internal Links
Another, more automated way of locating all your website's internal links is to use a website crawler, also known as a “spider.”
Spiders are essentially programmed bots that you can send to different areas of your site to comb through the page structure and return specific results, including links. In most cases, you would deploy a spider on your home page and allow it to comb through your entire site systematically.
After a spider finishes its crawling job, you’ll typically be given a dataset that you modify or export. Depending on the type of platform you use to create the spider, most will allow you to create an Excel or PDF document you can export for your records.
Use an SEO Tool to Find Internal Links
One of the most commonly used methods for sourcing all the internal links on your site is using an SEO tool. The great thing is that most SEO providers will allow you to crawl your site for free up to a certain number of times.
Some popular tools to consider that have both free and paid internal link crawlers are Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz. A nice feature when using these tools is that they’ll not only help you find all the internal links on your site pages, but they’ll also provide you with their status codes so you can quickly find out if all the links are working correctly.
The Quickest Ways to Find Internal Links
Below is one of the easiest and quickest ways to sound internal links, as well as some considerations you’ll want to make when evaluating your link integrity:
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is one of the quickest and easiest ways to locate all of your pages. Not only is the tool free to use and download, but it also provides you with comprehensive information about your website’s structure. Below is a step-by-step guide on how you can use the tool:
Step 1: Crawl your entire website
Download and run your Screaming Frog tool. At the top of the tool, enter your website’s URL. Make sure that the crawl mode is set to “Spider,” then click the “Start” button, and the crawler will run.
Step 2: Search for your URL and/or select it in the Address column
After the crawler finishes, the main dashboard will populate all of the URLs found on your site. Locate the specific pages you’re wanting to investigate. To do this, you can either use the search bar on the tool just above the crawling results table or you can scroll down the “Address” column and select it manually.
Step 3: Go to the Inlinks tab at the bottom
Once you select your URL, view the lower section of the dashboard for information regarding the page. Navigate through the several tabs until you find the label “Inlinks” and click it. You’ll now have a full list of all the internal links found on the selected URL.
Step 4: Export the internal links (optional)
If you want to download the list for further analysis, you’ll find an “Export” button in the same “Inlinks” tab. Click it and select whether you want the report in CSV or Excel format.
Limitations of Search Console
While free tools like Google Search Console are a good option when wanting to take a higher-level overview of your link structure, they’re not perfect.
One of the biggest challenges of GSC reports is that they won’t reference the anchor text associated with your links. They also won’t give you specifics about where those links are located on the source page, which can be challenging if you’re trying to modify them.
Common Internal Links Optimizations for SEO
When you come across different internal links on your site, specific SEO tools like Screaming Frog will provide you with specific status codes or added context on your links. Below are some helpful tips for dealing with these:
Internal links that return a 404 - These errors refer to broken page links. It’s essential to fix any 404 errors on your site since they can harm your SEO efforts. Resolve these issues by updating the link to the correct page or removing it altogether.
Internal links that 301 redirect - A 301 redirect tells web crawlers that the URL has changed and will point to a new location. While these are important to have, you want to make sure that they perform the way they should. Look for ways to improve the redirect time of these links and make sure users (and crawlers) can quickly access the information.
Topical and anchor text optimization - The anchor text associated with your internal links should always be relevant to the resource it points to. Audit all the internal links you find and change the keywords and terms used so that they’re descriptive and accurate.
In Summary
Your internal links are an important element of your SEO. By following this guide, you’ll be able to quickly audit the available links on your site to ensure they’re working correctly and optimized for search engines.