Internal Linking Structure

This SEO tool helps you quickly spot orphaned or weakly-linked pages by extracting your site’s internal linking structure.

All you need to provide is a sitemap.

Example using PLI Writer’s sitemap:

A visual of the internal linking structure of PLI Writers

I made this tool because a graph gives a clearer picture than numbers and analyses. Each circle is a page listed in the sitemap, and if circle A has an arrow that points to circle B, then it means page A has one or more links to page B. If there are no arrows pointing to a page, then it means visitors have no obvious way to discover that page. The redder (darker) an arrow is, the more frequently that page is being linked to compared to other pages. The closest tool I can find is ScreamingFrog’s visualizations, but I don’t think they are for internal links.

This tool is now hosted on Apify!

https://apify.com/mysteriousshadow/internal-links-scraper

The scraper outputs internal linking structure, and further data processing is needed to visualize the data.

A few limitations to consider:

  • The visualization is practical only for small websites. Otherwise it gets messy.
  • Please wait for a moment after you click “Analyze” for the server to process the sitemap. Don’t spam click.
  • Can’t scrape dynamically-generated pages

If you guys think this idea can be helpful, then I have the following planned:

  • Dynamic circle sizes and positions based on number of pages
  • Groupings of pages instead of everything being in a circle
  • Interactable elements – for example, clicking on a page will single out only the connections to and from that page.
  • Quick stats like how frequently a page is being linked
  • Detect and report bad internal linking practices like too many links, broken links, self links, and nofollow attribute.

I’m excited to hear your thoughts! In the meantime, if your business/website needs any content writing services for marketing and SEO to grow organic traffic, we offer expert, streamlined content creation from keyword research to uploading to your CMS.

Thanks!