Internal Link Graph

Crawls your site and maps every internal link, separating body-copy links from navigation, because a menu link is a template repeating itself, not one page vouching for another. Finds editorial orphans, pages buried past three clicks, dead ends, and anchor text that describes nothing.

How to use it

  1. Enter your domain. It reads robots.txt and your sitemap, then fetches each page and parses every anchor on it.
  2. Each link is classified by where in the document it sits. Links inside nav, header, footer or aside are template furniture; links in body copy are editorial.
  3. The graph is built from both, a crawler follows any link, but every finding is computed on the editorial subset, which is the only one that says anything about your site rather than your theme.
  4. Start with the orphans. A page nothing links to in body copy is a page your own site has never argued for, however many times the footer mentions it.

What the numbers mean

Why navigation links do not count
If your nav has thirty items and you crawl 150 pages, every one of those thirty pages has 150 inbound links and every other page has almost none. The numbers are enormous and they measure your template, not your site. An editorial link is one page choosing, in its content, to point at another, and that choice is the signal.
Editorial orphans
A page reachable only through the menu. Most link tools report it as healthy because the raw inbound count is high. In practice nothing on the site has ever given it context or anchor text, which is why these pages tend to sit at position 15 with no obvious explanation.
Click depth
The fewest clicks from the homepage to a page. Past about three, pages are crawled less often and recover from changes more slowly, not as a penalty but because crawl budget is spent near the front. A hub page listing buried content is usually the cheapest fix, and often earns traffic itself.
Anchor text
The words in the link are the clearest statement available about what the destination is about, written by a page that is not the destination. “Read more” wastes that entirely, and it is the most common internal anchor on the web.

Questions

How is this different from a normal broken-link checker?

A link checker tells you which links 404. This maps structure: what points at what, how deep everything sits, and which pages your own site treats as important. The distinction that matters most is editorial versus navigation, and most free tools do not make it at all.

Does it follow links or read the sitemap?

It fetches the URLs in your sitemap, then reads every link on those pages. That means it can tell you about URLs you link to but did not list in the sitemap, usually a useful surprise, and it will not discover pages that are neither in the sitemap nor linked from one that is.

Will it hammer my server?

No. Four requests at a time with a pause between each, which is unremarkable for any server that survives a search crawler. It reads robots.txt first.

What counts as body copy?

Anything not inside a nav, header, footer or aside element, or an element with a navigation, banner or contentinfo role. If your theme puts its menu in a plain div, some template links will be counted as editorial, check the “most linked” table against what you expect before trusting the orphan list.

Guides that use this tool

Other free tools