How to Do an Internal Link Audit: Step-by-Step Checklist

What is an Internal Link Audit?

An internal link audit is a review of every link between the pages of your own website. It checks that links work, that they point to the right pages, that important pages receive enough links, and that no page is isolated. The goal is a link structure that helps search engines crawl your site and understand which pages matter most.

An audit is especially useful after a redesign, a migration, a URL change, or when traffic drops without a clear reason. On a growing site, a light audit every few months keeps problems from piling up.

Why an Internal Link Audit Matters for SEO

Internal links decide how crawlers move through your site and how link equity is shared between pages. Over time, broken links, redirects, orphan pages and over-optimized anchors accumulate. Each issue is small, but together they waste crawl budget, weaken priority pages and create a poor experience for visitors.

Internal Link Audit Checklist

1. Broken links: find internal links that return a 404 error and fix or remove them. Use the free broken link checker.
2. Redirected links: update links that go through a redirect so they point directly to the final URL.
3. Orphan pages: list pages that receive no internal links. Use the free orphan page checker.
4. Dead-end pages: find pages with no outgoing internal links that trap visitors and crawlers. Use the free dead-end page checker.
5. Link depth: make sure important pages are reachable within about three clicks of the homepage.
6. Priority pages: compare the pages that receive the most internal links with the pages you want to rank.
7. Anchor text: check that anchors are descriptive and that the same anchor does not point to several different pages. Use the free anchor text cannibalization checker.
8. Nofollow on internal links: remove nofollow from internal links unless you have a specific reason (see dofollow vs nofollow).

How to Prioritize Fixes

Start with issues that affect pages bringing traffic or revenue: broken links on key pages, orphaned landing pages and priority pages with very few links. Then handle sitewide patterns, such as a broken link in a template, which fixes many pages at once. Cosmetic anchor improvements come last.

Internal Link Audits on Webflow, WordPress and Wix

• Webflow: check Rich Text fields of CMS items, where most broken and outdated links hide, and collection lists that limit how many items are linked.
• WordPress: check links left behind by changed permalinks, deleted posts and plugins that generate related links.
• Wix: check blog posts and dynamic pages after URL changes, since old links are not always updated.

Common Mistakes

• Running one audit and never repeating it.
• Fixing broken links by redirecting everything to the homepage.
• Looking only at broken links and ignoring orphan pages and link distribution.

How LinkerFlow Helps

LinkerFlow runs this audit for you every week. It detects broken links, redirected links, orphan pages, dead-end pages and anchor cannibalization, lets you fix issues in bulk, and suggests new contextual links to strengthen priority pages. It works on Webflow, WordPress and Wix. For a free one-time check, start with our free SEO tools.