Internal Linking Planner
Paste your pages and your money pages and get the actual instruction — add a link on this page, to that page, with this anchor — plus the orphans, the over-linked pages and how deep everything sits.
| On this page | Link to | Anchor text | Why |
|---|
| Clicks | Pages now | After the plan |
|---|
Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.
Why this is the linking work worth doing first
- They are the only links you fully control. Every external link is somebody else's decision, made on their schedule. Internal links are a text edit. If you are waiting on outreach, this is the work that is not blocked.
- The anchor text is free and it is yours. Over-optimised external anchors are a risk signal; internal anchors are how a site is expected to describe itself, and nobody has ever been penalised for writing "link building services" in a sentence on their own blog. It is the cheapest relevance signal available, and most sites spend it on the words "click here" and "read more".
- Depth matters more than people think. A page four clicks from the home page gets crawled less often and receives almost nothing from the pages that have authority. Moving it to two is usually one link, and the difference is not subtle.
How the suggestions are chosen
Each target page is reduced to the meaningful words in its keyword and title. A source page is a candidate when those words already appear in its own title, keyword or URL — that is, when the two pages are genuinely about overlapping things and a link would read naturally rather than being bolted on. Candidates are then ranked, with a target that nothing currently links to and a target you marked as a money page both pushed up the list, and a source that already carries a lot of outbound links pushed down.
Two caps keep the output sane: no source page is asked for more than the number you set, and no ordinary target receives more than two new links in one round. Money pages may receive up to five. Those caps are the reason the plan is short. A plan with two hundred rows does not get implemented.
The anchor text varies on purpose
The first link into a page gets its exact target keyword. The second gets the page's title, or the clause before the first dash or colon in it. That is not superstition about penalties — it is that forty internal links carrying an identical anchor is a footprint of a template, not of editorial writing, and the variants give you a second and third phrase to rank for. If you need more phrasings than the tool produces, write them. It has only your titles to work from.
The numbers that are judgement, not fact
Two of them. The fifteen-outbound-link ceiling is a working figure, not a Google rule; there has been no hard limit for many years, and a long, genuinely useful resource page can carry far more. Treat it as a prompt to look at the page rather than a verdict on it. And the two-clicks target for money pages is a convention that has held up well, not a threshold anyone has measured — what is actually true is that fewer clicks means more crawling and more equity, all the way down.
Everything else here is arithmetic: the depth figures are a breadth-first walk of the link map you pasted, and the orphan list is simply the pages that appear as a target nowhere in it.
Questions people ask
Where do I get the list of existing links?
Any crawler will export it — Screaming Frog's "All Inlinks" report, Sitebulb's internal links export, or an Ahrefs or Semrush site audit. Two columns, source and target. Leave the box empty and the tool will treat every page as an orphan, which is a useful worst case but not your actual site.
Should navigation and footer links count?
Leave them out. They appear on every page, so they flatten depth for a handful of URLs and tell you nothing about the rest — and a plan built on them would suggest links that already effectively exist. The interesting map is in-content links only.
How many internal links should one page have?
There is no limit worth quoting. The real constraint is that each link divides the page's outgoing equity, so a page with eighty links passes very little through any one of them, and a reader will not follow any of them. If you want the arithmetic on how many links a site of a given size needs to stay shallow, the internal link calculator does that.
Why does it suggest a link my page cannot naturally make?
Because the overlap is computed from the keyword and title you supplied, and those can overlap while the pages do not. Skip the row. A suggestion you cannot write a sentence around is a suggestion to throw away, not a paragraph to bolt on the bottom of the page.
Is my site structure uploaded anywhere?
No. The whole thing runs in your browser and nothing leaves the page — which matters here more than on most tools, because a full URL list is a reasonable description of your entire business.
Related tools
Internal links move authority. They cannot create it
A perfectly linked site with nothing pointing at it from outside is a perfectly linked site that does not rank. The plan above is the half you control.