Internal link equity audit

Internal links decide what gets crawled often and what gets treated as important. Most sites concentrate links on navigation and starve the pages that make money. This skill finds the imbalance and redistributes.

The skill file

---
name: internal-link-equity-audit
description: Use when important pages are buried deep in the site, or when new content takes weeks to be indexed.
---

# Internal link equity audit

Internal links decide what gets crawled often and what gets treated as important. Most sites concentrate links on navigation and starve the pages that make money. This skill finds the imbalance and redistributes.

## What you need first

- A full crawl exporting internal inlinks per URL
- A list of the pages that actually matter commercially

## Method

1. Count unique internal inlinks per URL, excluding site-wide navigation and footer links - those are noise that make every page look equally linked.
2. Compute click depth from the home page. Anything commercially important sitting deeper than three clicks is the first thing to fix.
3. Cross-reference: pages with high commercial value and low contextual inlinks are the priority list.
4. Find orphans - pages in the sitemap with zero internal inlinks. They are usually invisible to crawlers regardless of sitemap inclusion.
5. Add contextual links from pages that already have authority, using descriptive anchor text rather than "read more" or the bare URL.
6. Recrawl and confirm depth reduced and inlink counts rose on the target pages.

## What this produces

A priority list of under-linked commercial pages with specific source pages and anchor text for each new link.

## Where this goes wrong

- Counting navigation links, which flattens the analysis to nothing
- Adding a links block at the page bottom rather than contextual in-copy links
- Fixing depth by adding to navigation, which dilutes every other link

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/internal-link-equity-audit

What you need first

• A full crawl exporting internal inlinks per URL
• A list of the pages that actually matter commercially

Method

1. 01 Count unique internal inlinks per URL, excluding site-wide navigation and footer links - those are noise that make every page look equally linked.
2. 02 Compute click depth from the home page. Anything commercially important sitting deeper than three clicks is the first thing to fix.
3. 03 Cross-reference: pages with high commercial value and low contextual inlinks are the priority list.
4. 04 Find orphans - pages in the sitemap with zero internal inlinks. They are usually invisible to crawlers regardless of sitemap inclusion.
5. 05 Add contextual links from pages that already have authority, using descriptive anchor text rather than "read more" or the bare URL.
6. 06 Recrawl and confirm depth reduced and inlink counts rose on the target pages.

What this produces

A priority list of under-linked commercial pages with specific source pages and anchor text for each new link.

Where this goes wrong

• Counting navigation links, which flattens the analysis to nothing
• Adding a links block at the page bottom rather than contextual in-copy links
• Fixing depth by adding to navigation, which dilutes every other link

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