The Page With Two Hundred Links
Extract every link from a typical homepage and you'll get a list far longer than the page appears to contain. Navigation, footer, breadcrumbs, related content, social icons, legal pages, language switchers, pagination — most of a page's links are structural rather than editorial.
That's normal. What makes the extract useful is what you do with it: sorting the structural links from the editorial ones, and then checking the editorial ones for the problems that accumulate silently over years.
Getting the Inventory
The Link Extractor pulls every anchor from a page:
- Enter the URL.
- Read the extracted links with their anchor text.
- Note which are internal and which point off-site.
The first thing to check is simply the count. A content page with 300 links is mostly navigation, and every editorial link on it is competing for attention with 290 others. A page with four is probably under-linked.
There's no correct number, but a page where template links vastly outnumber content links is one where your internal linking strategy isn't actually reaching the reader.
Anchor Text: The Highest-Value Thing in the Extract
Read the anchor text column and the problems become obvious fast.
Non-descriptive anchors
click here
read more
learn more
this page
here
more info
These fail on two fronts.
For readers using screen readers, a common navigation technique is to pull up a list of all links on the page and scan it. A list of eleven "read more" entries is useless — there's no way to tell what any of them lead to.
For search engines, anchor text is a signal about the destination page's subject. "Click here" describes nothing.
The fix is to make the anchor describe the destination: not "click here to see our pricing" but "see our pricing plans."
Bare URLs as anchor text
https://example.com/very/long/path/to/document
Read aloud by a screen reader character by character, or truncated awkwardly in narrow layouts. Use descriptive text and put the URL in the href.
The same anchor pointing to different pages
If "documentation" links to three different pages across your site, both readers and search engines get an ambiguous signal. Anchor text should be consistent for a given destination and distinct across destinations.
Different anchors for the same page
Less harmful, and worth some variety — but if a page is linked as "pricing," "our plans," "cost," and "how much it costs," you're diffusing the signal. Some variation is natural; complete inconsistency isn't.
Over-optimised anchors
The opposite failure: every internal link using an exact keyword phrase. Reads unnaturally and looks manipulative. Anchor text should be what a person would naturally write.
Auditing the Destinations
Anchor text is half the audit. The other half is checking where the links actually go.
Broken links. The obvious one. Content moves, sites reorganise, external pages disappear. Link rot accumulates continuously in any content older than a couple of years.
Redirect chains. A link pointing to a URL that 301s to another URL that 301s again. Each hop adds latency and, for internal links, wastes crawl efficiency. Point links at the final destination.
HTTP links on an HTTPS site. These either trigger a redirect or, in the case of embedded resources, a mixed-content warning. Update them to HTTPS directly.
Links to noindexed or canonicalised-away pages. Passing readers and crawl attention to a page you've told search engines to ignore.
Internal links using absolute URLs with the wrong hostname. A link to http://example.com/page on a site that canonically uses https://www.example.com triggers an unnecessary redirect on every click.
Trailing slash inconsistency. Half your internal links with a trailing slash, half without, when one form redirects to the other.
Sort the extracted list by destination and these patterns become visible immediately.
External Links
Every external link is a small ongoing commitment, because you don't control the destination.
Check what you're linking to periodically. A site you linked to three years ago may have changed ownership, expired and been re-registered, or started serving something you wouldn't endorse. Expired domains with existing backlinks are actively bought for this purpose.
Use rel attributes appropriately.
<a href="..." rel="nofollow"> <!-- don't endorse -->
<a href="..." rel="sponsored"> <!-- paid or affiliate -->
<a href="..." rel="ugc"> <!-- user-generated -->
Reviewing whether these are applied correctly across a page is a straightforward audit once you have the extract.
Watch for target="_blank" without rel="noopener". Modern browsers imply noopener for target="_blank", but older browsers don't, and the omission allows the destination page to manipulate the originating window via window.opener.
Internal Link Structure
Beyond individual link quality, the extract tells you something about site architecture.
Which pages get linked from many places? Those accumulate the most internal signal. Check whether they're the pages you actually want to be prominent — often the most-linked pages are the contact page and the privacy policy, purely because they're in the footer.
Which important pages get linked rarely? A page that only exists in the sitemap and isn't linked from any content page is effectively orphaned from a reader's perspective, even if it's technically reachable.
How deep is the click path? A page reachable only through four levels of navigation is harder for readers and crawlers to reach than one linked from a hub page.
Extracting links from a handful of key pages — homepage, main category pages, a representative article — gives you a rough picture of how link equity flows without a full crawl.
A Repeatable Audit
For each template and a sample of content pages:
1. Extract the links.
2. Separate template from editorial. Navigation and footer links repeat everywhere; content links are the ones that carry topical meaning.
3. Scan anchor text for the non-descriptive patterns. "Click here," "read more," bare URLs.
4. Check destinations resolve. 200 status, no redirect chain, HTTPS, not noindexed.
5. Review external links for relevance, current content, and correct rel attributes.
6. Check for orphans by comparing your sitemap against the set of URLs that appear as internal link destinations anywhere.
7. Re-run periodically. Link rot is continuous, not a one-time cleanup.
Fixing at the Template Level
Most link problems in a CMS-driven site come from templates, not individual pages.
A "Read more" button in a card component appears on every listing page. Fixing it once in the component fixes hundreds of instances. Adding the article title to the accessible name — via visually hidden text or an aria-label — solves the screen reader problem without changing the visual design:
<a href="/article/">
Read more<span class="visually-hidden"> about internal linking</span>
</a>
Similarly, if internal links are generated from a URL field that allows any format, normalising that field — enforcing HTTPS, canonical hostname, consistent trailing slash — fixes an entire category of redirect problems at the source.
Practical Tips
Write anchor text that works out of context. If it wouldn't make sense in a list with no surrounding text, rewrite it.
Link to the final URL, not to a redirect.
Audit content older than two years first. That's where link rot concentrates.
Keep an eye on the ratio of template to editorial links on content pages. If it's heavily skewed, your navigation may be crowding out the links that matter.
Don't add internal links for their own sake. A link that a reader wouldn't follow adds noise. Link where it genuinely helps someone get to related information.
Archive important external references. If you're citing something that matters, consider whether an archived copy should be linked alongside the live one.
FAQ
How many links should a page have? There's no fixed limit. What matters is the ratio of useful editorial links to structural ones, and whether each link serves a reader.
Is "click here" actually a problem? Yes, on two counts: screen reader users navigating by link list get no information from it, and it provides no signal about the destination.
Should external links open in a new tab?
It's a design decision with accessibility implications — it removes the back button as a way to return. If you do it, ensure rel="noopener" is present and consider indicating it visually.
What's a redirect chain and why does it matter? A link pointing to a URL that redirects to another that redirects again. Each hop adds latency and wastes crawl efficiency. Link directly to the final URL.
How often should I check for broken links? Quarterly for most sites, more often for content that links heavily to external sources. Link rot is continuous.
Do footer links carry the same weight as content links? Generally not. Links in main content, particularly early in it, are treated as more significant than boilerplate links repeated site-wide.
The Takeaway
A link extract turns an invisible layer of your site into a list you can sort and check. Most of what it reveals — non-descriptive anchors, redirect chains, links to pages that no longer exist — is fixable at the template level, which means an afternoon's audit can resolve problems affecting hundreds of pages at once.
Extract every link from any page free with the Link Extractor at sadiqbd.com — no sign-up, instant results.
