How would you best review internal links globally for a specific website?
- Crawl a website with an SEO crawler and review page authority
- Crawl a website with an SEO crawler and review anchor text
- Turn JavaScript off in your browser on each page to see how internal links change
- Crawl a website with an SEO crawler and review crawl maps and page authority
- Crawl a website both with JavaScript on and off and compare the differences in internal links**
- Use the ‘inurl:’ command in Google to review all internal links
Explanation:
This method provides the most complete, “global” picture of your internal linking strategy for two key reasons:
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Crawl Maps (or Link Visualization):
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What they are: SEO crawlers like Screaming Frog or the site audit tools in Semrush and Ahrefs can generate visual diagrams of your site’s linking structure.
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Why they are best for a “global” review: These maps allow you to see your entire website architecture at a glance. You can instantly identify:
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Key Hubs: Pages that have many links pointing to them and linking out to other pages.
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Silos/Clusters: Groups of closely interlinked pages about a specific topic.
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Orphaned or Poorly Linked Pages: Pages that are disconnected from the main site structure.
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Crawl Depth: How many “clicks” it takes to get from the homepage to any other page.
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Page Authority (Internal PageRank/Link Score):
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What it is: This is a metric calculated by the crawler that shows how much internal authority each page has accumulated based on the quantity and quality of internal links pointing to it.
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Why it’s essential: It adds a quantitative layer to your visual map. You can see not just how pages are connected, but also which pages are the most powerful according to your current linking strategy. This helps you determine if authority is flowing to your most important pages or getting stuck on less important ones.
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Combining the visual crawl map with the quantitative page authority data gives you the most powerful and complete understanding of your internal linking on a global scale.
Why the Other Options Are Less Effective
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Crawl a website with an SEO crawler and review page authority: This is good, but it’s only half of the best answer. It gives you the “what” (which pages are authoritative) but not the visual “how” (the structure that creates that authority).
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Crawl a website with an SEO crawler and review anchor text: This is a crucial but different task. Reviewing anchor text is about analyzing the context of your links, not the overall structure and authority flow. It’s a more granular review.
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Crawl a website both with JavaScript on and off…: This is a specific diagnostic test for JavaScript SEO issues. It’s vital for JS-heavy sites but isn’t a method for a general, global review of the entire link architecture.
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Turn JavaScript off in your browser…: This is an inefficient, manual version of the option above and is not a practical way to review an entire site.
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Use the ‘inurl:’ command in Google…: This is incorrect. The inurl: operator finds pages that have a specific word in their URL; it does not review the internal links on those pages.