Link Mapping: Overview

Internal links are how search engines discover your pages and how authority flows through your site. Most sites link almost by accident. A few pages collect all the links, important pages get none, and there is no deliberate structure. Link Mapping crawls a client's site and draws it as an interactive map. Every page is a node, and every internal link is a line between two nodes. Once you can see the structure, the problems jump out: orphaned pages with nothing pointing to them, Money pages buried deep in the site, blog posts that don't connect to anything.

The link map is also the foundation for the Linking Plan, which turns the gaps you can see into concrete, prioritized link recommendations.

Where to find it

Open a client and click Link Mapping in the sidebar. Each client has one link map. If the client doesn't have one yet, you'll see a Create your link map screen. Click Start discovery crawl to create the map and open the site crawler on the client's domain. The Client Setup Wizard usually creates the map for you when you add the client.

What the crawl collects

When you run a crawl, RankNest discovers the site's pages (via the sitemap and by following internal links) and records for each one:

• The URL, title, and meta description
• A best-guess page type (see Page Types & Clusters)
• Every internal link the page points to, with the anchor text used
• Word count and other on-page details

Only editorial, in-content links are counted. Navigation menus, headers, footers, and sidebar widgets are filtered out, because those links appear on every page and tell you nothing about a page's real relationships. If a link you expect to see is missing from the map, check whether it lives inside the site's navigation or footer on the live page.

The three pieces

• The canvas is the interactive map itself. Pan, zoom, search, select, and rearrange pages; click any node or link to inspect it. See Working with the Canvas.
• The site crawler is a guided wizard that crawls the site, lets AI categorize the pages it finds, and imports them onto the map. See Crawling Your Site.
• Page types and topic clusters are the organizational layer. Every page gets one of eight types (Money, Pillar, Supporting, Service, Location, Company, Archive, Product), and related pages are grouped into topic clusters within topic categories. See Page Types & Clusters.

A typical workflow

1. Crawl the site from the Crawl button in the sidebar. RankNest discovers pages and draws the map.
2. Check page types. Skim the nodes and fix any misclassified pages. Every page needs a type before you can generate a Linking Plan.
3. Organize pages into topic clusters (a Pillar page plus its Supporting articles) using the Topic Clusters tab.
4. Read the map. Use the Map Key tab to decode node colors and link styles. Purple lines flag duplicate links: the same page linking to the same target more than once.
5. Click Plan to generate the Linking Plan and turn the gaps into an actionable checklist.

Tips

• Spend your time getting page types and clusters right. That's the input the AI reasons over when generating recommendations. A clean map produces a sharp Linking Plan; a messy one produces noise.
• Re-crawl after you make changes on the live site. RankNest picks up new pages and links, and automatically marks Linking Plan recommendations as implemented once it sees the link you added.
• The same URLs also appear in the client's Pages inventory, so metadata you see on the map stays in sync with the rest of the platform.

Related

• Crawling Your Site
• Working with the Canvas
• Page Types & Clusters
• Linking Plan Overview