How do I view internal links in Google Search Console?

Open Links in the Search Console menu. The Internal links section lists your pages by how many links Google found pointing at them from elsewhere on your site, and clicking a row shows which of your pages link to it. Treat it as a sample: tables stop at 1,000 rows, recently removed links can linger, and the report doesn't say which links are nofollow. It is good for spotting patterns, not for a complete link inventory.

Reading the internal links table

• Top linked pages shows the pages your site links to most. Your homepage, main categories and key product or service pages should sit near the top.
• A page you care about with few internal links is the main thing to look for. Search Console can't flag it for you; compare the table with your list of important URLs.
• The pages linking to a target, shown when you click it, tell you where its links come from. A key page linked only from a footer or a tag archive deserves links from relevant articles.

What the report can't tell you

Google's Links report help is open about the limits:

• It isn't a comprehensive list of every link on your site.
• Tables are cut off at 1,000 rows, so large sites see a truncated picture, and an export of a single table stops at the same 1,000 rows.
• Some URLs are left out, such as pages that aren't indexed, and duplicate links are combined.
• Links you have since removed can still be counted.
• nofollow isn't shown.

Pages with no internal links at all never appear, which is exactly why orphaned pages are hard to find here. Compare the table against your sitemap: a URL in the sitemap that never shows up as a link target may be orphaned.

What Google wants from internal links

Google's link best practices come down to a few rules:

• Use real <a> elements with an href. Links added by JavaScript are fine; elements that only navigate through a click handler may not be followed.
• Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on the site.
• Write anchor text that describes the target page. Avoid "click here", and don't stuff keywords into it.
• Link in context, where the target helps the reader. There is no ideal number of links per page.

How AutoPSEO helps

The site audit in AutoPSEO's research tools crawls your site and flags the problems the Links report can't show: orphan pages that only the sitemap mentions, broken internal links, pages with no outgoing links, and pages five or more clicks from the homepage. When the content engine writes a new article, it may only link to pages that exist on your site (your key pages, your other live articles, top pages from Search Console and sitemap URLs), and any other link is turned into unlinked text before the article is delivered.