Internal Link Analysis Example: Anchor Text and Structure

Eight generic anchors are worth replacing. The usual justification given for it, however, is wrong, and it leads people to the wrong fix.

Generic anchors do not "waste link equity." A link passes what it passes regardless of the words wrapped around it. Changing "click here" to "SEO audit guide" does not increase the authority flowing down that link by any amount.

What the anchor text actually does is describe the destination. It is one of the clearest signals available about what the linked page is about — a short, human-written summary of the target, offered voluntarily. "Click here" describes nothing. The link still passes authority; it simply arrives carrying no information about what it is pointing at.

Of everything in this report, /blog/old-post-2023 with zero inbound internal links is the one to act on first — because it is not a matter of degree. A page nothing links to is a page that may as well not exist.

The confusion worth clearing up: a sitemap is not a substitute for a link. Being listed in an XML sitemap makes a URL discoverable. It does not make it important. Google treats sitemaps as a hint, not an instruction, and a URL that appears in the sitemap while nothing on the site links to it is sending a contradictory message — you have told Google the page exists, and simultaneously demonstrated, through your own site structure, that you do not consider it worth pointing at.

This is one of the commonest causes of the "Discovered — currently not indexed" status in Search Console. Google knows the URL. It has decided the page is not worth the crawl budget, and your own internal linking is the evidence it used.

Orphan pages are one end of a spectrum. The underlying variable, and the one most worth managing, is click depth — how many clicks from the homepage it takes to reach a page.

Google has stated the principle directly: pages closer to the homepage are treated as more important. Not because of a depth number in an algorithm, but because your linking structure is your statement of what matters. A page you link to from the homepage is a page you have said is important. A page reachable only through four clicks of pagination is one you have said is not.

The commonest cause of excessive depth is pagination. A blog index at ten posts per page buries post 200 at depth twenty. Category pages, tag pages and hub pages that link directly to their most important children are the fix — and they are worth building precisely because they flatten the structure.

The 100-link figure is one of the most repeated numbers in SEO, and it is a historical artefact. It comes from an old Google guideline about keeping pages to a "reasonable" size, from an era when the crawler truncated very large documents. Google has since said explicitly that there is no fixed limit on the number of links a page may have.

So 142 total links is not, by itself, a problem. What matters is the ratio of signal to template.

• Navigation, footer and sidebar links appear on every page. Google recognises boilerplate for what it is and discounts it heavily. A link in a 60-item mega-menu is worth close to nothing.
• Body-content links are the ones that carry weight — chosen deliberately, in context, with anchor text a human wrote.

The real question this report is asking is not "how many links?" but "how many of them mean anything?" A page with 140 links of which 130 are the header and footer has ten links that count. That is the number to look at.

And on the flip side: 55 external links from one article is high. Not a penalty — but each one is an invitation to leave, and if they are not genuinely useful to the reader, they are working against the page.

The finding about /pricing, /schema-tools and /aeo-checker not being linked from this article is the one with money attached, and it is the one people skim past because it is not flagged as an error.

The logic is simple and it is sound. This is a high-traffic article. Those are conversion pages. A contextual link from the first to the second passes authority in the direction you actually want it to go — and, more immediately, it puts the relevant page in front of someone who is already reading about the problem it solves.

A note on over-optimisation: the report flags "excessive links" to two internal pages. Repeatedly linking the same page with the same exact-match commercial anchor, from everywhere, is a recognisable pattern and it is not a natural one. Vary the anchor text. Describe the destination differently in different contexts, because in genuine writing that is what happens anyway.

What is an orphan page?

An orphan page is a page on your site that has no internal links pointing to it. Without internal links, search engine crawlers may never discover the page, and it receives no internal link equity. Orphan pages are identified by crawling your site and comparing pages found in sitemaps against pages found via links.

How many internal links should a page have?

There is no hard limit, but Google recommends keeping pages crawlable with a reasonable number of links. Most SEO practitioners suggest 100 or fewer total links per page. More importantly, links should be contextually relevant and use natural anchor text rather than generic text like 'click here'.

What is link equity?

Link equity (also called PageRank or link juice) is the authority passed from one page to another via links. Internal links distribute this equity across your site. Pages with many internal links pointing to them accumulate more equity and tend to rank better. Link important pages prominently in navigation and body content.

Does "click here" really waste link equity?

No — a link passes what it passes regardless of the words wrapped around it, and changing the anchor does not increase the authority flowing through it. What anchor text actually does is describe the destination: it is a short, human-written summary of what the target page is about, offered voluntarily. "Click here" simply describes nothing. The stronger argument is accessibility — screen reader users navigate by pulling up a list of links stripped of their surrounding sentences, and eight identical "click here" entries pointing at eight different pages is useless. Every link should make sense read in isolation.

Isn't the sitemap enough to get my orphan page indexed?

No. A sitemap makes a URL discoverable; it does not make it important. Google treats sitemaps as a hint rather than an instruction, and a URL listed in the sitemap that nothing on the site links to sends a contradictory message — you have said the page exists while demonstrating, through your own structure, that you do not consider it worth pointing at. This is one of the commonest causes of "Discovered — currently not indexed" in Search Console. The fix is one contextual link from the body of a genuinely related page, not a link from an archive index or a footer widget.

Is 100 links per page a real limit?

No. It is a historical artefact from an old Google guideline written when the crawler truncated very large documents, and Google has since said explicitly that there is no fixed limit. What matters is the ratio of signal to template. Navigation, footer and sidebar links appear on every page, and Google discounts boilerplate heavily — a link in a 60-item mega-menu is worth close to nothing. Body-content links are the ones that carry weight. The useful question is not how many links a page has, but how many of them mean anything.

What is click depth and why does it matter?

Click depth is how many clicks from the homepage it takes to reach a page, and Google has stated the principle directly: pages closer to the homepage are treated as more important. Not because of a depth number in an algorithm, but because your linking structure is your own statement of what matters. Pages at five or more clicks are crawled rarely, if at all, and frequently make up the "Discovered — not indexed" population. The commonest cause of excessive depth is pagination — a blog index at ten posts per page buries post 200 at depth twenty. Hub and category pages that link directly to important children are the fix.