SEO Internal Linking

seo-internal-linking (M10)

Internal links distribute crawl priority and topical authority and tell search engines (and AI crawlers) how your pages relate. Reference: references/schema-tier1.md for the entity/@id linkage this topology should mirror; M6/seo-entity-linking owns external sameAs.

Inputs

Work from the PageSnapshot named in your dispatch envelope: read parsed from <run_dir>/pages/<slug>.json (anchors[] with region/internal/anchor, landmarks) and the crawl graph in <run_dir>/crawl.json (graph.edges, pages[].inlinks, templates[]); Grep pages/<slug>.html for verbatim evidence; site artifacts live in <run_dir>/site/{robots.json,sitemaps.json,discovery.json}. Deterministic findings already emitted by audit.mjs are listed in <run_dir>/findings.deterministic.json — do not re-emit those ids; add model-judged findings only. If invoked directly with a URL/path and no snapshot exists, first run node "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/snapshot.mjs" <target> --out "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}/runs" and use the printed snapshot path.

Audits

Working from the PageSnapshot (parsed_rendered when render.used is not none, else parsed):

1. Pillar/cluster topology: classify each URL (pillar hub vs. cluster page) and confirm clusters link up to their pillar and the pillar links down to its cluster — gaps break the hub-and-spoke model.
2. Contextual in-body links: count links inside <main>/<article> prose (target ~3-5 descriptive in-content links per page); flag pages with zero in-body internal links.
3. Anchor-text descriptiveness: flag generic anchors ("click here", "read more", "learn more", bare URLs) and over-optimized exact-match repetition; anchors should describe the destination.
4. Orphan pages: list URLs in the sitemap/crawl with no incoming internal links from other crawled pages.
5. Nav-vs-in-content ratio: flag templates where boilerplate nav/footer links overwhelm contextual links, diluting per-page link signal.
6. Semantic HTML: check for <main>, <article>, <nav>, <header>, <footer>, one <h1>, and a logical heading order — semantic structure helps both parsers and accessibility.

Fixes

• PROPOSED (fixable: proposed): concrete internal-link insertions — a specific source page, the target URL, the suggested anchor text, and the sentence/selector to attach it to — emitted as a unified diff for fix. These require per-item accept because auto-injecting body links can alter meaning, tone, or reading flow.
• ADVISORY (fixable: advisory): wrapping content in semantic tags (<main>/<article>/<nav>) and heading-order corrections — described, never written by the tool, since they touch template structure.
• Never invent target URLs, anchor wording, or topology you cannot observe in the snapshot/crawl — ask the user or leave a clearly-marked TODO placeholder. (Severity for this module's findings: 3.)

Verification

• Per page: node "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/link-graph.mjs" --snapshot <pages/<slug>.json> (or --url <u> / --file <path> --base <origin>) returns that page's link profile (verification.method: link_graph): total_links, internal_unique, external_unique, in_content_target, generic_anchors, empty_anchors, dropped. It does not compute topology from one page.
• Site topology: read <run_dir>/crawl.json (graph.edges, pages[].inlinks, templates[]) — the crawl already built it. --crawl [--max 25] [--max-depth 3] [--no-robots] [--ua <preset>] runs a fresh shallow same-site crawl and adds a crawl block with potential_orphans (a crawled page with no inbound internal link from another crawled page; the start page is never one, and the script itself calls the list non-authoritative). Pillar/cluster judgement is model work on top of those edges, not a script output.
• The full topology/orphan check needs a site-wide crawl tier. When that crawl data is unavailable, status is needs_api — never a false pass.

Findings

Emit findings per schema/finding.schema.json. Examples:

• M10.contextual.too_few_inbody_links — fewer than ~3 contextual in-body links (status warn, severity 3, fixable: proposed, axis search, confidence directional).
• M10.anchor.generic_text — anchor reads "click here"/"read more" (status warn, severity 3, fixable: proposed, axis search, confidence directional).
• M10.orphan.no_incoming_links — page has no internal inlinks from the crawl (status fail, severity 3, fixable: advisory, axis search, confidence established).
• M10.semantic.missing_main — no <main>/<article> landmark around primary content (status warn, severity 3, fixable: advisory, axis search, confidence directional). Each finding: evidence.observed quotes the page (the anchor text, the link count, the offending element); verification.reproduce is the runnable link-graph.mjs command above; expected_impact is banded + confidence-tagged (no naked percentages).

Honesty

• A fixed "3-5 links per page" is a usability/structure heuristic, not a ranking law — treat the count as directional and never cap a score on it alone.
• Exact-match anchor stuffing and "more links = more authority" are myths: relevance and editorial context matter more than raw count, and excess can look manipulative. Recommend links only where they genuinely help the reader.