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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.

CATEGORY
On-page SEO
FORMAT
internal-link-equity-audit.md
STEPS
6
PRICE
Free - no account
WHEN TO REACH FOR THIS

Use when important pages are buried deep in the site, or when new content takes weeks to be indexed.

The skill file

internal-link-equity-audit.md 
---
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
Free to download · no account, no email

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

Use this skill in your own AI

The download is a plain markdown file with the name and trigger in its frontmatter. Where an assistant supports skills it can load itself, that frontmatter is what it reads to decide this one applies.

Claude Code Save it as ~/.claude/skills/internal-link-equity-audit/SKILL.md and Claude loads it on its own when what you are doing matches the trigger line. Put it in .claude/skills inside a project instead if the whole team should have it.
Claude Upload the file in the skills section of your settings. Once it is there it applies itself in any conversation where the trigger fits, so you do not have to remember it exists.
ChatGPT There is no skills format to install into, so paste the file contents into a Project instruction or a Custom GPT instead. It then applies to every chat in that project rather than only the one you paste it into.
Anything else Paste the markdown into the chat before your question. It works in any assistant, it just has to be pasted again each time.

Questions about this skill

When is an equity audit the right method rather than adding the page to navigation?

When commercially important pages sit deep in the site or new content takes weeks to index. The reflex is to add the page to the main navigation, which raises one page by diluting every other link on the site. Contextual links from pages that already have authority move the same signal without spending it site-wide.

What do I need in hand before starting?

A crawl exporting internal inlinks per URL, and an honest list of the pages that make money. Without the commercial list you get a ranking of well-linked pages, which is a description of your navigation, not a finding. Without the crawl you cannot spot orphans, and a page in the sitemap with zero inlinks is usually invisible whatever the sitemap says.

What do I end up with, and which part gets used?

A priority list of under-linked commercial pages, each with named source pages and the anchor text to use. The source and anchor pairing is the part that gets used: a list of weak pages with no instruction on where the links come from goes back to the person who filed it. Depth and inlink counts before and after are how you check it landed.

What most often ruins this?

Counting site-wide navigation and footer links in the inlink totals. Every page then looks equally linked and the analysis returns nothing, which is why the audit gets abandoned as unhelpful. The related waste is answering the finding with a related links block at the foot of the page, which is cheap to build, easy to ignore and treated as boilerplate.

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