Free Internal Link Checker: Every Anchor Text and Nofollow on a Page

Paste the URL into the checker above. You get back every internal link the page contains, each with its destination, its anchor text, and whether it passes link equity or carries a nofollow — the output shown under "How does the internal link checker work?" above. That is the whole check, and it takes about a second.

There are four other ways to get at the same information, and each answers a different question:

• View the source. Open the HTML and search for <a href. Free and exact, but unreadable past about thirty links, and you still have to resolve every relative path in your head.
• Crawl the site. A crawler visits every page and builds the link graph. This is the only way to answer site-wide questions, and the one covered under site-wide audits below.
• Read Search Console. The Links report lists your most internally-linked pages. It reflects what Google actually saw, which is its real value, but it lags by days and it will not show you anchor text per link.
• Use the site: operator. It tells you what is indexed, not what is linked. Useful as a cross-check, misleading on its own.

The reason to run a single-page check first is that it is the fastest way to find out whether the problem is real. Across the sites we audited in the first half of 2026, broken internal links returning a 4xx were the sixth most common individual failure, hitting 36.1% of them. A page-level scan tells you in one pass whether you are in that third.

It reads the raw HTML — the bytes the server returns, before a browser runs any JavaScript. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the single most important thing to understand about the output.

I built it this way because it approximates the first thing a crawler does with your page. A search engine fetches the HTML, extracts the links it finds, and queues them. Rendering happens later, on a separate budget. A link that exists only after hydration is a link that gets discovered late, or not at all. So the list this tool returns is closer to "what gets crawled first" than to "what a visitor can click".

The cost of that choice is a blind spot, and it is a big one. Across the same audit set, 31.4% of sites had content present in the rendered DOM but absent from the raw HTML. If your navigation is a client-rendered component, this tool will undercount it, and the honest response is to check the page against the website crawl test, which runs a real headless render and diffs the two.

Four smaller rules are worth knowing before you file a bug report:

1. A subdomain counts as external. We compare hostnames after stripping a leading www., so a link from example.com to blog.example.com sits outside the internal count. That matches how link equity is usually modelled across hosts, but it is a judgement call rather than a rule of physics.
2. mailto: and tel: count as external. They leave the site, so they leave the internal number.
3. Anchor text is truncated at 200 characters. Long enough for any real anchor; short enough that a link wrapping a whole paragraph does not flood the table.
4. The list caps at 500 rows, the counts do not. On a page with 3,000 links you see the first 500 rows but the correct totals.

Two different numbers both get called "internal links", and mixing them up is the most common mistake on this topic. This tool counts the links going out of the page you scanned. The published research is about links coming in to a page. They are not the same measurement, and only one of them predicts traffic.

On incoming links there is good data. Zyppy's study of 23 million internal links found that URLs with 0 to 4 incoming internal links averaged 2 clicks from Google Search, while URLs with 40 to 44 averaged four times as many. Past roughly 45 to 50 the relationship reverses, and traffic starts to fall again as the count climbs.

So if you want a target, it belongs to your destination pages: the URLs you care about should be receiving somewhere in the region of forty internal links from across the site. You cannot see that from a single scan, because it is a site-wide question. But it tells you what the scan is for — every row this tool returns is one incoming link for some other page.

On outgoing links, which is the number this tool gives you, there is no published sweet spot. Google's guidance dropped the old "keep links to a reasonable number, around 100" line years ago and replaced it with no numeric limit at all. What it does still require is crawlability: Google needs a crawlable <a> element with an href to follow a link at all. A <div> with a click handler is not a link, however much it behaves like one on screen.

Read your outgoing count as a shape rather than a score. Six internal links on a long article means the page is a dead end — readers and crawlers arrive and have nowhere to go next. Three hundred usually means a mega-menu is being counted, and the handful of links you deliberately placed in the body are lost among them.

Anchor text is the part of an internal link that carries meaning. The link itself creates a crawl path and moves equity; the anchor tells a search engine what is at the other end. This is why two links to the same page can be worth very different amounts.

The rule is short: the anchor should read like the topic of the page it points at, in the words a person would use.

That last row is the one worth scanning for. When the checker returns a blank anchor, it is almost always an image wrapped in a link where the image has no alt text. Neither a crawler nor a screen reader gets anything from that link. It is the cheapest fix on any page, because you are not adding a link — you are describing one that already exists.

Varying your anchors is not just a safety measure against looking engineered — it appears to be the more valuable half of the exercise. The same 23-million-link study found that the number of distinct anchor text variations pointing at a page correlated with search traffic more strongly than the raw count of links did. A page reached by forty links that all say the same three words is being described to Google in exactly one way. Forty links using a dozen honest phrasings describe it from a dozen angles.

The one thing not to do is write anchors for the crawler at the expense of the sentence. An anchor that reads awkwardly to a person is a signal that you have optimised past the point of usefulness.

Almost never, and the reason is older than most people expect.

The idea that you could nofollow low-value internal links to funnel equity toward important ones — PageRank sculpting — stopped working in 2009. Matt Cutts, then head of Google's webspam team, explained the change: a nofollowed link no longer redistributes its share of a page's equity to the remaining links. That share is simply dropped. Sculpting stopped being a clever redistribution and became a straightforward subtraction.

So when a scan shows nofollow on internal rows, the finding is usually not a strategy. It is one of three things:

• A CMS or template setting that applied rel="nofollow" to a whole block of links and was never revisited.
• A plugin that adds nofollow to outbound links and misclassifies a subdomain or a protocol-relative URL as outbound.
• A page-level <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> that quietly marks every link on the page, which is why we fold that tag into each row rather than reporting it separately. If every internal link on your page came back nofollow, check the head first.

The exception worth keeping is a destination you genuinely do not want crawled — a login URL, a cart, a faceted filter combination that generates thousands of near-identical URLs. Even there, blocking the pattern in robots.txt or handling it with canonicals is usually the more reliable control, and internal nofollow is the weaker instrument.

In this order, because it runs cheapest-and-most-certain first:

1. Empty anchors. Add alt text to linked images. No judgement required, and it fixes accessibility at the same time.
2. Unintended nofollow. If internal rows come back nofollow and nobody decided that, find the template or the meta tag and remove it.
3. Links to redirects. Every internal link pointing at a URL that 301s adds a hop for both crawlers and users. Run the destinations through the redirect checker and repoint them at the final URL.
4. Generic anchors on important destinations. Rewriting "read more" into the destination's topic costs one line and improves the strongest on-page signal you fully control.
5. The count, if it is very low. A page with a handful of internal links needs inbound links from elsewhere on the site more than it needs outbound ones. That is a site-level fix.

That last point is where a single-page check runs out of road, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. This tool reads one page. It cannot tell you which pages have no inbound internal links at all — and orphan pages are the internal-linking failure that actually costs traffic. Across the sites we audited in the first half of 2026, the sites failing on crawlability carried a median of 8% of their pages as orphans. Nothing you can see from one URL will surface that.

For the site-level view — every page crawled, broken internal links listed, orphans identified, click depth measured — run a full site audit, or browse the rest of the free SEO tools if you want to check one specific thing first.

Source: SEOmator crawling and audit data, January–July 2026 (100,000+ websites audited, 50M+ pages crawled).