Free Internal Link Checker — Paste HTML, Analyse All Links

How to Use the Internal Link Checker

Why Internal Links Matter for SEO

Internal links are one of the few on-page SEO signals you have complete control over. Every time you link from one page on your site to another, you are passing two things: PageRank (Google’s measure of authority) and context (the anchor text tells Google what the destination page is about). Get internal linking right and you can lift rankings for key pages without building a single new backlink.

In my client audits, the most common problem I find is not that sites have too few internal links — it’s that the links they have use weak anchor text. “Click here,” “read more,” and “this post” tell Google nothing about the destination page. The internal link checker above extracts every link from your page and flags these generic anchors so you can replace them with descriptive keyword-rich text.

For a full framework on how internal links fit into a broader site health strategy, the technical SEO audit guide covers link structure alongside crawlability, indexation, and page experience.

What Makes a Good Internal Link

A strong internal link has three properties:

• Descriptive anchor text: The clickable words should reflect the target page’s focus keyword or a close variant. “WordPress speed optimization guide” as anchor text is far more valuable than “click here to read more.”
• Contextual placement: Links placed within the main body content carry more weight than those in footers, sidebars, or navigation menus. Google treats body text links as editorial endorsements.
• Relevance: Link to pages that are topically related to the current page. A WordPress tutorial linking to another WordPress guide makes sense; the same tutorial linking to your pricing page requires more context.

The number of internal links per page matters less than their quality. Three well-placed contextual links with keyword anchors outperform ten footer links and a dozen “read more” buttons.

Common Internal Link Issues to Fix

When I run an internal link audit on a new client site, these are the issues that come up most often:

• Empty anchors: Images used as links with no alt text, or anchor tags with no content at all. Google cannot interpret what these links are about.
• Generic anchor text: “Click here,” “read more,” “here,” “this,” “link” — all completely non-descriptive. Replace with the target page’s focus keyword.
• Orphan pages: Pages with no internal links pointing to them. If Google cannot find a page by following internal links from your homepage, it may not index it at all. Every published page should receive at least one internal link.
• Over-optimised anchors: Using the exact same keyword anchor text for every link to a page looks unnatural. Vary the phrasing (“WordPress speed guide,” “how to speed up WordPress,” “page speed tips”).
• Broken internal links: Links pointing to pages that no longer exist (404 errors). These waste crawl budget and provide a bad user experience. The technical SEO checklist includes a dedicated crawl error section for finding these.

How to Use This Internal Link Checker

The tool above analyses the raw HTML of any page you provide. Here is the most reliable way to get your page’s HTML:

1. Open the page in Chrome.
2. Press Ctrl+U (or Cmd+U on Mac) to open the page source in a new tab.
3. Press Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C to select and copy all the source.
4. Paste into the text area above and enter your domain name to help the tool classify http:// links correctly.
5. Click Analyze Links and review the results table.

The tool flags issues automatically: empty anchors, generic anchor text, nofollow attributes, and links that open in a new tab. Export the full results as a CSV to paste into a spreadsheet for bulk editing.

This is the first step I run when auditing a new page for improving its technical SEO. It takes two minutes and consistently turns up quick wins. For broader internal linking strategy and site architecture patterns, Google Search Central has documentation on how Googlebot crawls and follows links.

Implementing Internal Links in WordPress

In the WordPress Gutenberg editor, you add internal links by selecting text and pressing Ctrl+K. Start typing the title of the target post and WordPress will suggest matching pages automatically — no need to paste URLs manually.

For bulk internal linking across an existing content library, the process I use with clients is:

1. Run this checker on each key page to get the current link inventory.
2. Export the CSV and identify all generic or empty anchors.
3. For each generic anchor, find the target page’s focus keyword (from your keyword list or the page’s RankMath focus keyword field).
4. Edit each page in WordPress and update the anchor text.
5. Re-run the checker to confirm all issues are resolved.

Done consistently across your site, this process alone can produce meaningful ranking improvements within 60–90 days — especially for pages that already receive some impressions but are stuck in positions 10–30. All 50 SEO and development tools are in the free tools directory.

Frequently Asked Questions