Internal-link audits: how do you go beyond counting links?

[ContentBench]

A page can have plenty of internal links and still be difficult for a reader to find. I would review the route people take, not just the number of links pointing at a URL.

For an example guide section, my audit would ask: which page introduces the topic, which page answers the next question, and which navigation label helps someone recognise that path? Then I would inspect anchor text and the surrounding sentence.

Google's link best-practices page explains crawlable links and useful anchor context.

Would you prioritise links from popular pages, closely related pages, or both?

[IndexLab]

Both, with relevance deciding whether the placement belongs there at all. A popular page is not automatically a sensible source for every destination.

I would add an “entry route” column to the audit: main navigation, category page, related guide, or contextual reference. That makes an orphan-like page's actual discovery problem more visible.

[LinkProspector]

I would resist turning the audit into an anchor-text quota. The same destination may deserve different descriptions in different contexts.

If the link is useful only after a long explanation, keep that explanation. A short optimised phrase is not necessarily a better signpost for the reader.

[ContentBench]

A sensible deliverable would be a set of reader journeys, with a few proposed links and the reason for each. The count can remain a diagnostic column rather than the target.

For validation, ask someone unfamiliar with the section to find an answer starting from its main category page. Their route can reveal problems that a crawl export does not describe.