Linked from the content of only one or two pages

What it is

Only one or two other pages on your site link to this page from their content. Menu, header and footer links may point to it as well, but they repeat on every page and say little about what this page is for.

Why it matters

Google uses links to find pages and to judge how they relate and which ones matter. Links placed in content, with descriptive text, are the ones that put a page in context. A page linked from one or two places tends to be crawled less often and treated as minor, which hurts most on the pages you want to rank or be cited for: guides, product pages and comparisons.

How Asky checks it

Asky maps the links between crawled pages from their raw HTML; JavaScript links are not seen. A link counts as navigation when the nearest <nav>, <header>, <footer>, <main>, <article> or <aside> around it is one of the first three, and as content otherwise. It is reported when one or two distinct pages link to it from content. Image-only links, self-links and links from pages outside your sitemap (the homepage aside) do not count; links via a redirect do. The homepage is exempt and error pages are skipped. It runs only in full-site audits with Link analysis on that reached every page without blocks or errors.

Reported as an opportunity with medium severity.

How to fix it

Find at least three related pages, such as articles, guides or product pages, where a reader would want this page next. Several links from one page count once.
Link to it from the body text of each, with link text that says what the page offers. Generic text such as “read more” is reported separately.
Use normal links: a link that wraps only an image is not counted, and links that all carry nofollow are reported separately.
Make sure the linking pages are in your sitemap; links from pages outside it do not count, except from the homepage.
Add it to a hub or category page where it belongs, in the page body. A new menu or footer link does not count toward the three.
To leave it as it is: if the page is deliberately low priority, such as a legal notice, mark the issue resolved.
A full-site audit is needed to re-check, because audits of selected pages skip this rule.

Example

https://example.com/guides/pricing-calculator is linked only from the pricing guide. Contextual links from two more related articles bring it to three linking pages:


<!-- On https://example.com/blog/saas-pricing-models -->
<p>Try your own numbers in the <a href="/guides/pricing-calculator">pricing calculator</a>.</p>

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