Internal linking

What this check looks at

Internal linking is one of the On-Page SEO checks. Elements on the page itself. It is judged from what your site served at the time of the crawl, and a page we could not reach is reported as unreachable rather than skipped.

It answers from these fields of the crawl record and nothing else, which is why it cannot be fooled by anything that is not on the page it was given.

• generic_anchor_text

How this one runs

This check answers entirely from a crawl of your own site. We fetch the page the way a search crawler would, parse what came back, and test the specific property this check is responsible for. There is no account to connect, no data set to license, and nothing to install, so it runs on the first audit you ever request and on every one after it.

The result is derived from what your site actually served us at that moment, not from a cached third party index that may be weeks stale. That means it reflects your site as it is today, and it also means a page behind a login, a firewall, or a robots rule we respect is a page we will report as unreachable rather than quietly skip.

What you get from it

• Runs on every audit, on every page we are allowed to reach
• No Google connection, no vendor subscription, no tracking script on your site
• Re-runs on a schedule, so a regression shows up as a change rather than as a surprise

What it reports when it fails

These are the findings this check can raise, taken from the code that raises them rather than rewritten for the website. An ellipsis stands where the report fills in what it measured on your page.

• worth fixingpage links to nothing, a dead end for crawlers
• noteonly … internal links on a substantial page
• fix nowthe blog index links to zero posts, posts are reachable only via sitemap,
• note… links use generic anchor text (\

Where it sits in the audit

See every on-page check or the full catalogue of 77 checks. The documentation covers the order checks run in and how a finding is fingerprinted, and the about page explains why we publish the checks that do not run.