How to Find Internal Links: 5 Ways To Try
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Whether you are working on an internal link strategy, doing a website or an internal link audit or looking to add a couple of internal links to a newly published post, you will want to know how you can check the internal link structure of a website.
As it happens, there are several ways to do it: some that will require a fair amount of manual labor, and some that will find the internal links to a page in a matter of minutes.
Being familiar with all of them will help you quickly find internal linking opportunities, as well as find and fix any broken internal links on your website.
Let’s dive right in!
Use Link Whisper to Find Internal Links
One of the fastest ways to check the internal linking of a website is to use the Link Whisper plugin, available for both WordPress and Shopify.
All you need to do is add it to your website and activate your license key, and you are ready to go.
Once you are all set, click on Link Whisper in your website’s dashboard, and go to Reports.
You’ll be shown a comprehensive link report, telling you how many links you have in total, and most importantly for our present task, how many internal links you have.
The Internal Links Report will break down how many inbound and outbound internal links each of your pages has. You can use the dropdown menu to check what these pages are, and which anchor text is used.
From there, you can choose whether you want to delete certain links, and quickly find pages that need more internal links, as well as those that are not currently linking to any of your other pages.
It’s worth noting that Link Whisper can also suggest posts to add links to. Just click on the Add button and you’ll be provided with a list of posts to consider.
As you’ve already seen, Link Whisper can also point out any orphaned pages, so you can get rid of them in a couple of clicks too.
Do a Manual Checkup
Another way to check internal links on a page is to do a manual checkup. This however is the slowest way to do it, and is only really recommended if you have a handful of posts to work with.
The process is simple: open each page of your website or every post on your blog, and skim it through. When you come across a link, hover over it to see where it leads.
If your posts are all a part of the same topical cluster, you are likely to spot plenty of internal linking opportunities while doing a manual checkup. However, it still requires a fair amount of time and a lot of clicking, so this is by far the least effective tactic.
A manual checkup is recommended when you are getting conflicting information from several tools. For example, you may discover that a link is being flagged as broken, only to discover there is nothing wrong with it when you check manually.
Find Internal Links in Google Search Console
Google Search Console can also help you check the internal links to a page.
Open your Search Console and click on the Links button near the bottom of the left-hand menu.
It will show you a list of both the external and internal links on your website.
When you click on More in the internal links report, you’ll be shown a list of all of your pages, as well as the number of internal links each page has.
You can then click on each page and see which pages are linking to it.
The drawback of this way of checking the internal link structure of your website is that you won’t know where on the page the link is located, nor what anchor text has been used. All you can do is filter through the list, and check if a certain page already links to the one you want to create more internal links for.
Use a Spider to Find Internal Links
SEO spiders can also help you check the internal linking of a website. We’d recommend using Screaming Frog, but you can use any spider of your choice.
In Screaming Frog, add the website you want to analyze and run the crawl. It can take anywhere from a couple of minutes for small websites to a couple of days for very large websites. You may want to exclude certain parts of the site, or perhaps only run a crawl of the blog, depending on your goal.
Once the crawl is done, add the page whose internal links you want to check into the search box. Select this page from the list below, and then click on the inlinks tab at the bottom of Screaming Frog. It will give you a list of all the pages that are linking to your page, as well as the anchors used.
You can export this list if you need to, and you can also use the filters if you want to find some more specific data.
Screaming Frog tends to be insanely accurate, so you will rarely find it’s finding links that aren’t actually present on the page, which is not always the case with other SEO tools.
Use an SEO Tool to Find Internal Links
If you are already using an SEO toolkit like Ahrefs, Moz or SEMRush, you can also use them to find internal links to a page.
Let’s look at the process in Ahrefs.
Add the page whose internal links you want to check to the search box in Site Explorer. Then click on the Internal backlinks report in the left-hand menu.
You’ll be shown a list of all the pages that link to your chosen page.
You can also use the filters at the top to find a specific page or anchor text, and you can also export your list, if you want to play with it further in a sheet.
Note that these tools can sometimes be wrong, and highlight issues or links that aren’t actually there. To be sure the information is correct, you can always double-check manually if you spot information that you don’t believe is true.
The Quickest Way to Find Internal Links
We hate to blow our own horn here, but the fastest way to find internal links to a page really is to use Link Whisper.
Crawling a website with an SEO spider can take a long time, SEO tool suites can be expensive and at times unreliable, and doing a manual internal link audit will take absolute ages.
Try our plugin today, and you’ll be amazed you ever managed without it!