internal-linking-architecturelisted

# Internal Linking Architecture Internal links are the only ranking lever you fully control. No outreach, no permission, no budget. They decide what a crawler finds, how important it concludes each page is, and what each page is about. Most sites get this wrong in the same way: hundreds of links pointing at the homepage and the blog index, and three links pointing at the page that makes money. ## The three jobs internal links do 1. **Discovery.** A page nothing links to is a page that may never be crawled, whatever the sitemap says. 2. **Authority distribution.** Link equity flows along internal links. Where you point it is a decision, whether or not you make it deliberately. 3. **Topical definition.** The anchor text pointing at a page, and the pages that link to it, tell a search engine what the page is about. This is often stronger than the page's own copy. ## Step 1: Map what exists You cannot fix a structure you haven't seen. Build the actual link graph. ```bash # Crawl the site and extract internal links per page # (any crawler works; the point is the graph, not the tool) curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' > urls.txt while read -r u; do curl -s "$u" \ | grep -oP '(?<=href=")(/[^"#?]*|https://example\.com/[^"#?]*)' \ | sed "s|^|$u |" done < urls.txt > links.tsv # Inbound internal links per page, ascending: the bottom of this list is the problem awk '{print $2}' links.tsv | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | head -40 ``` Three