SEO Tools·4 min read

Running an Internal Link Audit With a Link Extractor

Running an internal link audit is the highest-yield SEO work most sites never do, because the data gathering feels like a chore. It doesn't need to be. The Link Extractor pulls every anchor from a URL in one request, splits internal from external, and flags nofollow, which turns the chore into a paste-and-export loop. This guide covers the whole audit: what the split counts mean, how follow and nofollow differ in practice, how to find orphan pages with nothing but exports, and the mistakes that make link audits lie to you.

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The strong page your internal links ignore

Authority flows where links point.

Every site has one: a page that converts well, targets a valuable query, and sits three clicks deep with two internal links pointing at it, both from footers. Meanwhile, the blog post that went mildly viral in 2023 still collects forty inbound internal links it no longer deserves. Authority flows where links point, not where you wish it went.

You can't fix a distribution you've never measured. Measuring starts with extraction: one page at a time, every anchor, resolved and categorized.

Running an internal link audit, page by page

Pick the ten URLs that matter most to revenue, plus your homepage. For each one, paste the URL, press Extract links, and read the badges: total, internal, external, nofollow. Open the Internal tab, press Copy all URLs, and paste into a spreadsheet column headed with the source page.

Ten minutes later you have an adjacency map of your site's core. The questions nearly answer themselves. Which money pages appear in nobody's list? Which pages appear in every list because they sit in the nav, telling you nothing? Where does a high-authority page link out to only five body targets, leaving room for three more?

A worked link extraction with real counts

Input: one blog URL.

Extract a typical blog post and the badges might read: Input: one URL. Output: 148 total, 96 internal, 52 external, 7 nofollow. Those numbers look rich until you open the Internal tab and recognize the shape: roughly sixty of the internal links are navigation, footer, and category boilerplate that appear on every page of the site.

The body itself links to five pages. That's the real number for audit purposes, and it's why the anchor text shown under each URL matters. Rows reading 'Learn more' and 'Click here' are links spending their descriptive power on nothing, while 'cold brew ratio guide' tells users and crawlers exactly what's on the other end.

Follow vs nofollow links in the extracted output

Follow vs nofollow links used to be a bright line: nofollow passed nothing. Since 2019 Google treats rel=nofollow as a hint rather than a directive, alongside rel=sponsored and rel=ugc. For audits, the No-follow tab matters most on outreach: when a mention you earned turns out to be nofollowed, the value calculation changes even if some signal may still pass.

On your own site, internal nofollow is almost always debris from old PageRank sculpting advice. If the tab shows internal entries, investigate, because you're effectively asking Google to distrust your own pages.

Orphan page detection using nothing but exports

Orphan page detection is set subtraction. One set is every page you want indexed, which your sitemap already lists. The other is the union of internal links you've extracted. Pages in the first set that never appear in the second are orphans: reachable through the sitemap, invisible to users, starved of authority.

The page-by-page version catches the worst cases fast. Extract your highest-traffic hub pages, and any money page absent from every one of those lists is functionally orphaned, whatever a full crawl might eventually add.

Link audit mistakes that skew the picture

Watch for five distortions:

Treating navigation and footer links as endorsements, which makes every page look equally linked.
Auditing only the homepage, whose link profile resembles no other page on the site.
Ignoring anchor text, so twenty 'Learn more' links pass as healthy internal linking.
Counting a redirected target as a working link when the old URL burns a hop on every click and crawl.
Reading external link counts as leakage, when citing good sources is normal and expected.

Tips for keeping link exports usable

Copy from tabs, not from the All view; the Internal tab's Copy all URLs hands you a clean set with no manual filtering. Name spreadsheet columns after source URLs immediately, because fifty unlabeled paste columns are indistinguishable by lunchtime.

Also note the display cap. Each tab renders 200 rows on screen, but the copy button exports the full set, so trust the export over your scrolling.

Link Extractor, Broken Link Checker, or both

The Link Extractor inventories what a page links to; it never requests the targets. The Broken Link Checker does the opposite job, following each link to find 404s and dead ends. A serious audit uses them in sequence: extract to map the structure, then check to verify the destinations. And when the audit widens from anchors to media, the Image URL Extractor applies the same paste-a-URL pattern to every img tag on the page.