Internal links do two jobs at once. They help visitors find their way around, and they tell search engines which pages exist and which ones matter. Google’s guide to crawlable links puts it plainly: “Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl.”
That makes internal linking one of the few ranking levers you fully control. This guide covers what to measure in an internal linking audit and how to fix what you find.
What does an internal linking audit check?
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| How many clicks from the start is each page? | Deep pages get crawled less and receive less link equity |
| How many internal links point to it? | Pages linked from one place are easy to lose |
| Does it link anywhere? | Dead ends stop users and crawlers |
| Are any links broken? | Links to 4xx/5xx pages waste visits and crawls |
| Are internal links nofollowed? | Withholds signals from your own pages |
| Is anything linked only from the sitemap? | Those are orphan pages |
Click depth: are important pages buried?
Click depth is how many clicks a page is from the start page, following links. On a well-structured site, important pages are a few clicks away. On a site that grew organically, they can end up behind paginated archives or deep category trees.
There’s no official limit. Crawlens flags pages more than 4 clicks from the start, which is a common rule of thumb. More useful than the threshold itself is the pattern: if a whole section sits at depth 5 or 6, the navigation or category structure is the problem, not individual pages.
Fix: link important deep pages from higher-level pages: categories, hub pages, the homepage, related articles. Flattening pagination (more items per page, or links to deep pages from page one) helps on large archives.
Weak pages: linked from only one place
A page with a single internal link is one template change away from becoming an orphan. It also receives very little internal link equity. Crawlens flags indexable pages with only one internal link, excluding the start page.
Fix: add links from two or three relevant, well-linked pages, with descriptive anchor text. Related-content modules and contextual links in body copy work better than piling more links into the footer.
Dead ends: pages that link nowhere
Pages with no internal links stop visitors and crawlers in their tracks. They’re often landing pages, PDFs converted to HTML, or templates that forgot the navigation.
Fix: add navigation, breadcrumbs or links to related pages.
Internal nofollow
Adding rel="nofollow" to your own links withholds signals from your own pages. Google’s guidance on qualifying links says that for links within your own site, you should use robots.txt rather than nofollow to manage crawling. Crawlens lists pages with internal links that carry nofollow.
Fix: remove nofollow from internal links unless there’s a specific reason, like login or cart links, and handle crawl control with robots.txt.
Broken internal links
Links to pages that return 4xx or 5xx are the most urgent internal linking problem: every visit and crawl that follows them hits a dead end. Crawlens flags pages that link to broken internal URLs as critical. Links pointing to redirects are a related, smaller problem; see redirect chains.
Fix: update links to the working URL, or restore or redirect the target page. One template fix often removes hundreds of broken links at once.
How do you run the audit?
- Crawl in Website mode so the crawler follows links from the start page. Depth and inlink counts only mean something when the crawl followed links.
- Sort the URL table by depth and by inlinks to find buried and weak pages, and filter by issue to work through each check.
- Look for patterns by URL folder. Fixes usually belong in navigation, category templates or related-content modules.
- Prioritise pages with traffic. Connect Search Console: a deep or weakly linked page that already gets impressions, like a striking distance page, gains the most from better links.
- Re-crawl and compare to confirm depth and inlinks improved.
Checklist
- No broken internal links
- Important pages within about 3 clicks of the start
- Every indexable page linked from more than one page
- No dead-end pages
- No nofollow on internal links without a specific reason
- Internal links point to final URLs, not redirects
- No pages reachable only through the sitemap
Frequently asked questions
What is click depth?
Click depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the start page (usually the homepage) by following links. Pages many clicks deep tend to be crawled less often and get less internal link equity.
How deep is too deep?
There's no official limit. A common rule of thumb, and Crawlens's threshold, is more than 4 clicks from the start. Important pages should usually be reachable in 3 or fewer.
Should I use nofollow on internal links?
Generally no. Nofollow on internal links withholds signals from your own pages. Google suggests using robots.txt for parts of your own site you don't want crawled.
How many internal links should a page have?
There's no ideal number. What matters is that every page you care about is linked from at least one other page, as Google recommends, and important pages from several relevant, well-linked pages.
What is a dead-end page?
A page with no internal links to other pages on the site. Visitors and crawlers that land there have nowhere to go next.