Internal Link Analyzer

Analyze internal and external links on web pages with anchor text, nofollow detection, and link distribution.

What does Internal Link Analyzer do?

This actor analyzes links on web pages, separating internal links from external links. It detects nofollow attributes, empty anchor text, link context (nav, footer, main content), and provides link distribution statistics. Useful for SEO audits and site structure analysis.

Internal linking is one of the most powerful on-page SEO levers. It distributes link equity (PageRank) across your site, helps search engines discover and understand your content hierarchy, and guides users to related pages. This actor gives you a complete link profile for each page, including anchor text, nofollow attributes, and internal-to-external ratios.

The output includes top internal paths, top external domains, and summary statistics that make it easy to spot issues like orphan pages, excessive external linking, or navigation gaps. The internal link ratio provides a quick measure of how well each page links to other pages on the same domain versus sending traffic to external sites.

Use cases

• SEO specialist -- audit internal link structure to find pages with too few or too many internal links
• Content strategist -- identify orphan pages that lack internal links and are unlikely to be crawled or ranked
• Site architect -- review link distribution between navigation, footer, and main content areas
• Link builder -- find pages with excessive nofollow attributes on internal links that waste link equity
• Web developer -- validate link structure after site redesigns or navigation changes

Why use Internal Link Analyzer?

• Internal vs. external separation -- automatically classifies every link as internal or external based on domain
• Nofollow detection -- identifies links with rel="nofollow" that do not pass link equity
• Link context awareness -- detects whether links are in navigation, footer, or main content areas
• Distribution statistics -- provides unique URL counts, domain counts, and internal link ratios
• Batch processing -- analyze hundreds of pages in a single run
• Pay-per-event pricing -- costs just $0.001 per page analyzed

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
urls	array	Yes	--	List of URLs to analyze links on. Each page is analyzed independently.

Input example

{
    "urls": [
        "https://www.google.com",
        "https://www.wikipedia.org",
        "https://example.com"
    ]
}

Output example

{
    "url": "https://www.wikipedia.org",
    "domain": "wikipedia.org",
    "totalLinks": 45,
    "internalLinks": 30,
    "externalLinks": 15,
    "nofollowLinks": 2,
    "uniqueInternalUrls": 25,
    "uniqueExternalDomains": 8,
    "internalLinkRatio": 0.67,
    "topInternalPaths": [
        { "path": "/wiki/Main_Page", "count": 3 }
    ],
    "topExternalDomains": [
        { "domain": "wikimedia.org", "count": 5 }
    ],
    "issues": [],
    "error": null,
    "checkedAt": "2026-03-01T12:00:00.000Z"
}

How much does it cost?

Event	Price	Description
Start	$0.035	One-time per run
URL analyzed	$0.001	Per URL analyzed

Example costs:

• 10 URLs: $0.035 + (10 x $0.001) = $0.045
• 100 URLs: $0.035 + (100 x $0.001) = $0.135
• 1,000 URLs: $0.035 + (1,000 x $0.001) = $1.035

Using the Apify API

You can call Internal Link Analyzer programmatically from your own applications using the Apify API. The following examples show how to start a run, wait for it to finish, and retrieve the results.

Node.js

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('automation-lab/internal-link-analyzer').call({
    urls: ['https://www.wikipedia.org'],
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient('YOUR_TOKEN')

run = client.actor('automation-lab/internal-link-analyzer').call(run_input={
    'urls': ['https://www.wikipedia.org'],
})

items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items
print(items)

Integrations

Internal Link Analyzer works with all major automation and integration platforms available on Apify. Connect it to Make (formerly Integromat) or Zapier to create workflows that flag pages with poor internal link ratios. Export results to Google Sheets to build internal linking dashboards for your SEO team. Send Slack alerts when pages have zero internal links or excessive nofollow usage. Use webhooks to receive instant notifications when a run completes, or build custom automation pipelines with n8n. Schedule recurring runs on Apify to track internal link changes over time. All results are stored in Apify datasets and can be downloaded in JSON, CSV, or Excel format.

Tips and best practices

• Aim for a healthy internal link ratio -- most pages should have more internal links than external links; an internal link ratio below 0.5 may indicate poor internal linking
• Check for nofollow on internal links -- using nofollow on internal links wastes crawl budget and link equity; remove it unless you have a specific reason
• Monitor orphan pages -- pages with zero or very few internal links pointing to them are unlikely to rank; add contextual links from related content
• Review anchor text distribution -- diverse, descriptive anchor text helps search engines understand the topic of linked pages
• Run after navigation changes -- site redesigns and menu updates can dramatically change internal link distribution
• Look at external link targets -- the topExternalDomains field helps you see where you are sending traffic and whether any external links should be nofollowed or removed

FAQ

What is an internal link ratio? The internal link ratio is the number of internal links divided by the total number of links on a page. A ratio of 0.67 means two-thirds of the links on the page point to other pages on the same domain.

Why are nofollow internal links a problem? When you add rel="nofollow" to an internal link, you tell search engines not to pass link equity through that link. This wastes the ranking power your page could pass to other pages on your own site.

Does this actor follow links to crawl the entire site? No. The actor analyzes the links on each page you provide but does not follow those links. Each URL in your input is analyzed independently. For full site crawling, use a dedicated web crawler.

What counts as an internal link vs. an external link? Internal links point to other pages on the same domain (e.g., links from example.com to example.com/about). External links point to a different domain (e.g., links from example.com to wikipedia.org). Subdomains are treated as separate domains.

How many internal links should a page have? There is no fixed ideal number, but most well-structured pages have between 50 and 150 internal links (including navigation and footer links). The key is that important content pages should receive contextual internal links from related pages, not just navigation links.

How many URLs can I analyze in one run? There is no hard limit. You can analyze hundreds or thousands of pages in a single run. The actor processes each URL independently and concurrently for fast results.