Internal Link Calculator
Work out how many internal links each page needs for your whole site to sit within a given number of clicks from the homepage.
Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.
The arithmetic behind it
If every page links to L others, then within d clicks of the homepage you can reach about Ld pages. Turn that around and the links each page needs to cover N pages within d clicks is the d-th root of N.
A 500-page site at 3 clicks needs about 8 internal links per page. At 10,000 pages it is 22. This is a floor, not a target — it assumes no overlap, and real sites link to the same popular pages repeatedly, so allow more.
- Click depth is a ranking-adjacent signal. Pages buried five clicks deep get crawled less and rank worse, largely because that is also where the least link equity reaches.
- Nav and footer links do not count here. They appear on every page, so they flatten depth for a handful of URLs and do nothing for the rest.
- Orphans are invisible. A page with no internal links pointing at it depends entirely on the sitemap, and inherits no authority from anywhere.
Questions people ask
Is there a maximum number of links on a page?
Not any more. The old hundred-link guideline came from a crawler that stopped reading after about 100KB, and Google removed it from its documentation years ago. What replaces it is not a limit but a trade: the more links a page carries, the less any one of them signals, and the less likely a reader is to follow the one you cared about.
Do nofollow internal links let me steer authority?
No. PageRank sculpting stopped working in 2009 — a nofollowed link no longer hands its share back to the others, it simply evaporates. Nofollowing your own login page does not push anything toward your money pages, it just wastes the share. If a page should not receive authority, stop linking to it or stop having it.
Does URL depth matter as much as click depth?
No. A URL with four folders in it that is linked from the homepage is one click deep and behaves that way. It is the number of links you have to follow that costs you, not the number of slashes. Restructuring URLs to look shallower changes nothing on its own and breaks every link you already had.
What anchor text should internal links use?
Descriptive, and it can be exact-match far more freely than an external one. Nobody evaluates your site for over-optimised internal anchors the way they do for an inbound profile. What to avoid is "click here" and "read more", which describe the act rather than the destination.
How do I find the orphan pages?
Crawl the site, then subtract that list from everything you know exists — the sitemap, the CMS export, the URLs with impressions in Search Console. Anything present in the second list and absent from the first is reachable only by luck.
Guides for this tool
Related tools
Internal links sorted — now the external ones
Internal linking distributes authority. It cannot create any. That part comes from outside.
See link building packages Talk to Hayk
Further reading: DoFollow vs NoFollow: what actually matters · How to build backlinks fast, without wasting time