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.

Pages you actually want ranked. Exclude tag archives and paginated duplicates.
Average count of links pointing to other pages on your site, excluding nav and footer.
Pages with no internal links pointing at them at all.
0
Links needed per page

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.

Internal links sorted — now the external ones

Internal linking distributes authority. It cannot create any. That part comes from outside.

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