Internal Link Checker
Crawl your website the way Google does: follow every internal link from your start page, then see which pages are broken, buried, weakly linked or not linked at all.
Why internal links matter
Internal links are the roads through your website. Search engines discover pages by following them, and they use them to judge which pages matter most: a page linked from your homepage and ten articles looks important; a page nothing links to looks forgotten. Good internal linking is one of the few ranking factors fully in your control, and it costs nothing.
What the checker finds
- Broken internal links: links to pages on your own site that return 404 or another error, with the pages that contain them so you can fix each one.
- Orphan pages: pages listed in your sitemap that no crawled page links to. Google may still find them through the sitemap, but they get little attention.
- Weakly linked pages: pages with only one internal link pointing to them.
- Redirecting links: internal links that pass through a redirect before reaching the page.
- Deep pages: pages more than three clicks from your start page.
The full table shows every crawled page with its click depth and how many internal links point in and out, and you can download it as a CSV.
How to fix what it finds
- Fix broken links first. Update each link, or add a 301 redirect from the dead address to the best live page.
- Rescue orphan pages. Link to each from a related article or category page, with descriptive anchor text. If an orphan page is outdated, redirect it or remove it from the sitemap.
- Strengthen important pages. Your key product, service or guide pages should be linked from several relevant pages, not just the menu.
- Flatten deep sections. Add links from category pages, hub pages or “related posts” so nothing important is more than three clicks away.
How the crawl works
Starting from the page you enter, the checker downloads each page, reads its links and follows the ones on the same domain, up to the limit you choose, four pages at a time. It identifies itself as RankbenchBot and only reads public pages. Links added by JavaScript after loading, pages behind a login and files such as PDFs and images aren’t crawled. For a very large site, run it on different sections, e.g. your blog home or a category page.
How to use the Internal Link Checker
- Enter your homepage (or the section you want to check) and choose how many pages to crawl.
- Click Start crawl and wait while the pages are fetched. 100 pages take about a minute.
- Fix broken links first, then link to orphan and weakly linked pages from related content.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages can it crawl?
Up to 150 pages per run. For bigger sites, start the crawl from a section (such as your blog or a category) to check it in parts.
What is an orphan page?
A page that exists (it’s in your sitemap) but no other page on your site links to it. Visitors can’t reach it by clicking, and search engines treat it as less important.
Will the crawl slow down my site?
No. It fetches four pages at a time, similar to a few visitors browsing, and stops at the limit you set.