How to Audit Your Website's Internal Link Structure
How to Audit Your Website's Internal Link Structure
Link Analysis in QueryBurst provides a site-wide internal linking dashboard — total links, average links per page, depth distribution, hub pages (high outbound), dead ends (no outbound), and orphan pages (no inbound content links). Drill down into click depth, anchor text distribution, orphan detection, and an interactive link graph explorer. Use it to diagnose structural weaknesses that suppress individual page visibility and distort how link equity flows through the site.
Why Internal Links Matter for AI Visibility
AI search systems use internal links in two ways:
- Discovery — Crawlers follow links to find pages. Pages without inbound links (orphans) may never be indexed or retrieved.
- Relationship signals — Link patterns and anchor text tell AI systems which pages are related, which are most important (hubs), and how topics connect across the site.
A site with strong content but poor internal linking will underperform in AI-generated answers because the retrieval pipeline can't efficiently discover or contextualise the content.
What Link Analysis Covers
Link Analysis contains five views, each examining a different dimension of your link structure:
| Subtab | What It Shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | Site-wide dashboard — total links, depth distribution, anchor text cloud, hub pages, dead ends, and orphan counts. The quick health check. |
| Click Depth | How many clicks each page is from the homepage, measured both structurally (all links) and via content-only paths (editorial links). |
| Anchor Text | Frequency analysis of all internal anchor text — descriptive vs generic usage, empty anchors, and per-phrase drill-down. |
| Orphan Pages | Pages with no inbound content links (content orphans), no inbound links at all (true orphans), and pages with no outbound links (dead ends). |
| Link Explorer | Interactive force-directed graph visualisation — navigate hop-by-hop, inspect page details, identify clusters and bottlenecks. |
How It Works
Link Analysis uses the crawl data — every internal link discovered during the crawl is stored with its source page, destination page, anchor text, and link context (navigation, footer, or content area).
From this raw link data, the system computes:
- Click depth from the homepage for every page (BFS traversal)
- Content-only depth using only editorial links (excluding navigation/footer)
- Hub scores based on combined inbound + outbound link counts
- Orphan classification based on inbound link presence and type
- Anchor text aggregation across all links site-wide
No additional processing or API calls are needed — link analysis runs entirely from crawl data.
Key Metrics
| Metric | Description | Healthy Range |
|---|---|---|
| Avg links/page | Average internal links per page | 5+ for content pages |
| Max structural depth | Deepest page from homepage via any link | ≤4 for most content |
| Max content depth | Deepest page via editorial links only | ≤5 |
| Generic anchor % | Links using non-descriptive text ("click here", "read more") | <10% |
| Content orphans | Pages with no inbound editorial links | 0 ideal, <5% acceptable |
| Dead ends | Pages with no outbound links | <10% |
How Link Analysis Connects to Other Reports
Link data feeds into several other areas of QueryBurst:
- Entity Flow — Uses link presence between entity-mentioning pages to score structural support and identify missing links
- Entity Hubs — Identifies pages that should link to an entity's hub page but don't
- Topics & Focus — Semantic link alignment score measures whether linked pages are actually topically related
- Site Intelligence — Entity reinforcement scoring considers cross-page linking
- Page Overview — Shows per-page inbound/outbound link counts with orphan detection
Frequently Asked Questions
How is click depth different from URL depth?
URL depth is the number of path segments in the URL (e.g. /blog/2024/post/ = depth 3). Click depth is the minimum number of link clicks needed to reach a page from the homepage. A page with a deep URL can have a shallow click depth if it's linked from the homepage or a top-level page. Click depth is what matters for crawlability.
Why does content depth matter separately from structural depth?
Structural depth includes navigation, header, and footer links — which means most pages appear at depth 1-2 because they're in the nav. Content depth uses only editorial links within the page body, revealing the true editorial structure of the site. Pages at content depth 5+ are editorially disconnected even if technically reachable via navigation.
What's the difference between a content orphan and a true orphan?
A content orphan receives inbound links from navigation or footer but has no editorial links pointing to it from within page content. A true orphan has no inbound links at all — it's completely disconnected from the link graph. Content orphans are far more common and still problematic because AI crawlers following editorial links will never reach them.
Should every page link to every other page?
No. Internal links should be contextually relevant — linking related content strengthens topical signals. Excessive linking (linking everything to everything) dilutes the signal and provides no useful relationship information to AI systems. Focus on linking pages that share entities, topics, or user intent.
How often should I review link analysis?
After every significant structural change — adding new sections, reorganising URLs, or publishing batches of new content. Link issues are cumulative: each new page published without proper internal linking increases the orphan count and weakens overall connectivity.