Broken Link CheckerA finished run fills the page with suggestions and findings. By the end of this page you will know what each card and each tab tells you.
Content links and template links
The optimizer separates two kinds of link. A content link sits in the body text of a page. A template link repeats on most pages, such as menu, footer and sidebar links.
Template links count toward the total links on a page. They never count as content links. A page that only the menu links to still shows as a page with no content links.
The tabs
The tab bar has three groups. Each tab shows its count.
- Actions: Suggested, Approved and Skipped hold the link suggestions by status.
- Pages: findings about single pages.
- Anchors: findings about link text.
What a suggestion shows
Each card on the Suggested tab holds one suggestion:
- Impact: high, medium or low. Links to pages with no content links rank highest.
- Kind: Link to add for a new link, or Duplicate link for a repeated link to remove.
- Reason: one line on why this link helps.
- ON PAGE: the title and path of the page that gets the link.
- LINKS TO: the title and path of the page the link points at.
- ANCHOR: the suggested link text, with a button to copy it.
- Show on page: opens the paragraph as it reads NOW and as it reads AFTER the change.
The anchor text describes the target page in the language of the paragraph. A suggestion either turns words already in the paragraph into the link, or adds one short sentence that holds it. The AFTER view shows which one.
A duplicate suggestion covers a page that links to the same target more than once. It proposes to unlink the later link and keep the first.
Pages findings
- No content links: no page links to these from its content. Search engines find them late and rank them low.
- Dead ends: these pages link nowhere in their content, so a reader has to go back.
- Buried pages: more than three clicks from the homepage. Visitors and crawlers rarely reach them.
- Thin on links: other pages point here, but only just.
- Too many links: pages with more than 100 links in total, so each link counts for little.
- Unreadable: pages the run could not read, with the reason.
Each page row also names the other lists the page appears in, under Also flagged.
When a page counts as thin on links
A page is thin on links when it gets at least one content link, but fewer than 5. Pages with no content links at all go to their own tab instead.
The threshold is fixed at 5 for every run. The tool page has no setting to change it.
Anchors findings
- Weak anchors: link text that says nothing about the target, such as "click here", "read more" or "learn more".
- Duplicates: one page links to the same target several times. Only the first link carries weight.
- Conflicts: the same anchor text points at different pages, so search engines cannot tell which page it describes.
- Cannibalisation: two pages compete for the same keyword. Pick one to own it, and point the other somewhere else.
Working with long lists
Every findings tab has a Filter rows box and sortable columns. The list shows 40 rows at a time, with a button to show more.
One tab holds up to 400 rows. When a list is longer, fix the first rows and run the analysis again to see the rest.
An empty Suggested tab
"No new links to suggest" means the internal linking on your site is already strong. "All caught up" means you have handled every suggestion from this run. Run a new analysis to find more.