Internal links are the one ranking lever you fully control, and most WordPress sites waste them.
An internal linking audit is just a structured check of how authority moves around your site: which important pages are starved of links, which ones have quietly gone orphan, and whether your anchor text actually describes anything.
I ran this audit on our own site (wpconsults.com) so you can see the real numbers, not a tidy hypothetical.
Here is the exact workflow, the two tools I lean on, and what the audit actually turned up on our own pages.
Key Takeaways
- An internal linking audit checks three things: orphan pages (nothing links to them), weak pillars (important pages starved of internal links), and whether your anchor text is descriptive.
- Search Console’s Links report is the fastest, free starting point; a crawler like Screaming Frog then finds true orphans by comparing your sitemap to what it can actually reach.
- On our own site, all 3,835 internal links skew hard toward navigation pages (home, blogs, services), while individual posts get far fewer, which is the classic weak-pillar pattern.
- Our most-used internal anchor text is generic (“visit website”, “wpconsults”), which passes a weaker relevance signal than a descriptive anchor would.
- The fix is not “add links everywhere”; it is link, merge, or prune per page, then point links from strong posts to the pages you actually want ranking.
What an internal linking audit actually checks
Internal links do two jobs at once. They help Google discover and crawl your pages, and they pass authority (link equity) from your stronger pages to the ones you want ranking, which is the whole idea behind how link juice flows.
An audit checks that this plumbing is actually working. Three problems come up on almost every WordPress site:
- Orphan pages: nothing links to them internally, so Google reaches them slowly or not at all.
- Weak pillars: important pages, a key guide or a money page, are starved of internal links while thin pages soak them up.
- Lazy anchor text: anchors like “click here” tell Google nothing about the page they point to.
What we found auditing wpconsults.com
Here is the honest starting picture from our own Search Console. We have 3,835 internal links across the site, which sounds healthy until you look at where they point.
Every one of the top internally linked pages is a structural or navigation page: the homepage, the blog index, services, testimonials, about, pricing.
That is the weak-pillar pattern in one screenshot. The sitewide menu links every nav page from every page, so those counts balloon, while an individual guide that should rank might only have a handful of contextual links pointing at it.
The nav is doing the linking; the content mostly is not.
The anchor text told a similar story. Our most common internal anchors are generic, things like “wpconsults” and “visit website”, rather than descriptive phrases that tell Google what the linked page is about.
Useful for branding, weak for relevance.
Step 1: Map your internal links in Search Console
Start free, with a tool you already have. In Search Console, open Links, then look at the Internal links panel and its “Top linked pages” list.
That is your internal link graph ranked by how many internal links each page receives, and it is the fastest way to see where authority is pooling.
Read it two ways. The pages at the top are your best-linked, and you want your important content there, not only nav pages.
The pages you expect to see but do not, or that sit far down the list, are your weak pillars and orphan suspects. One honest limit: this report shows what is linked, so it hints at orphans by their absence rather than listing them outright, which is where a crawler comes in.
Step 2: Find true orphan pages with a crawler
To catch real orphans you need a crawler that can compare your XML sitemap against what it can actually reach by following links from your homepage.
Screaming Frog is the common choice: connect it to Google Analytics, Search Console, and your sitemap, run the crawl, then run Crawl Analysis to populate the Orphan URLs filter.
Screaming Frog defines an orphan cleanly: a URL that is in your sitemap but was not discovered by following internal links from the crawl start.
If a page you care about shows up there, Google is likely reaching it slowly, and it may drift into “crawled, currently not indexed”, which I break down in my guide on what that status really means.
No crawler installed? You can get most of the way without one.
Cross-check your sitemap URLs against the Search Console Links report and the not-indexed buckets: a valuable page that is missing from your internal links and stuck in a not-indexed status is an orphan in all but name.
Step 3: Spot weak pillars that are starved of links
A weak pillar is a page that matters commercially but has almost no internal links pointing at it. It is subtler than an orphan because the page is technically linked, just not enough to compete.
This is exactly what our own audit exposed: nav pages with 90-plus internal links, while individual guides that should rank sit far lower.
To find yours, list the pages you most want ranking, then check each one’s internal link count in the Links report. Any high-value page sitting near the bottom is under-supported.
Grouping related posts into proper topic clusters is the durable fix, because it concentrates links around the pillar instead of scattering them.
Step 4: Fix it with link, merge, or prune
Do not just bulk-add links everywhere; that dilutes the signal as much as it helps.
Work page by page with a simple decision: is this page worth ranking, is there a better version to merge into, or is it junk to prune. The flow below is the order I use.
How I decide what to do with each page an audit flags
- Ask first: is this page valuable and worth ranking?
- If it is junk or a duplicate, prune or noindex it, and stop linking to it
- If a better version exists, merge and redirect into that page
- If it is valuable but orphaned or weak, add links from strong related posts
- Use descriptive, keyword-relevant anchor text, never “click here”
For the pages worth keeping, add links from your strongest, most-linked posts, and write the anchor so it describes the destination.
If your top anchors read like ours did (“visit website”), that alone is an easy win, and matching anchors to the target’s topic ties into semantic SEO.
As you write, an SEO plugin such as Rank Math surfaces internal-link suggestions and a link counter, which makes keeping this tidy a habit rather than a quarterly cleanup.
| What to audit | Where to check it | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Orphan pages | Screaming Frog Orphan URLs, or the not-indexed buckets in Search Console | Every valuable page has at least one internal link pointing in |
| Weak pillars | Search Console, Links, Internal, Top linked pages | Your money pages sit near the top, not just navigation pages |
| Anchor text | Search Console, Links, Top linking text | Descriptive, varied anchors, not “visit website” or “click here” |
| Junk soaking up links | Crawler plus your own judgment | Thin or duplicate pages are pruned, not internally boosted |
So, is an internal linking audit worth your time?
In my opinion, it is one of the highest-leverage hours in SEO, because unlike backlinks, every part of it is in your hands.
Our own audit was a good reminder of that: a healthy-looking 3,835 internal links that mostly propped up nav pages, money pages left under-linked, and anchors that said “visit website” instead of naming the topic.
None of that needs a big project to fix. Find the orphans, feed the weak pillars from your strongest pages, and write anchors that actually describe the destination.
Do it once, keep it tidy as you publish, and you are steering authority to the pages you care about instead of leaving it pooled on the menu.
Want this audit run on your own site?
If you would rather see your own orphan list and weak pillars than dig through the reports yourself, feel free to contact us or email me and I will run the internal linking audit on your site. It is usually the cheapest ranking win sitting in plain sight.
Update Logs
11 Jul 2026
- Published with a live internal linking audit of our own site: the real Search Console numbers (3,835 internal links skewed to nav pages, generic anchor text), the orphan and weak-pillar checks, and a link, merge, or prune fix workflow.
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