What are internal links?
An internal link leads from one page of a site to another page of the same site: the menu, the footer, a “related articles” block, a link inside a paragraph. Links to other sites are called external.
Internal links do two jobs. They let visitors move around the site, and they let search engines find its pages. Google’s own guidance is that it discovers pages mostly by following links, and that it uses the text of a link to understand what the page it leads to is about. A page nothing links to is hard to find, and a link that leads nowhere wastes a visitor’s click.
How this test works
Our server downloads your page and reads every link in its code. It sorts them into internal and external, by comparing each link’s site with the page’s own.
Then it requests each internal address once to see what it answers. A working page answers with status 200. A status starting with 3 is a redirect: the link works, but through an extra step. A status starting with 4 or 5 means the link is broken. You see exactly what the link itself answers. Where it is a redirect, we follow it to its end and draw the chain: every address the visitor is passed through and what the last one answers.
Links to other sites are listed too, with their text and their marks (nofollow, sponsored, ugc), but they are not requested: we check only your own site’s addresses.
For each internal link it also looks at the text a visitor clicks, whether the link is marked “nofollow”, and whether it uses http on a page served over https. One check requests at most 60 addresses; if the page has more, the report says how many were left unchecked.
What is a good result?
There is no official score for this, so the report gives a sign, not a number. A tick means every internal link we checked answers with the page itself and nothing else needs attention. An exclamation mark means there are things worth a look: links that go through a redirect, links with no text or with text like “click here”, internal links marked “nofollow”. A cross means at least one internal link is broken.
Google sets no limit on the number of links on a page, and neither do we. The count is shown for your information.
What this test can’t tell you
This is one page, not a crawl of the site. It shows the links that leave this page, not which pages link to it, and it can’t find pages that nothing links to. For that you need a crawler, or the Links report in Google Search Console.
We read the page’s code and don’t run its scripts, so links that a script adds, such as a menu built in the browser, are not listed. A site may also answer our requests differently from a visitor’s: a status of 403 or 429 can mean the site turns automated checks away, and such links are reported apart from the broken ones.