No internal links on the page

What it is

The page’s HTML contains no links to your own site: any links it has go to other domains. A visitor who finishes reading has nowhere on your site to go next, and a crawler that lands on the page has no path from it back into the site.

Why it matters

Google finds pages and understands how they relate through links, and can only crawl a link that is an <a> element with an href. A page without internal links passes nothing on and shows nothing about where it fits. Often the links do exist for visitors but are built by scripts or with elements that are not links, so the HTML the server sends has none, and any crawler that does not run JavaScript sees a dead end.

How Asky checks it

Asky counts the <a href> links in the page’s raw HTML; links added by JavaScript and click handlers on other elements are not seen. Each link is resolved against the page URL and is internal when it lands on the page’s own host, whatever the port; the other www form of your domain counts as external. Fragments such as #top, empty hrefs, and mailto:, tel:, sms:, javascript: and data: links lead to no other page and are ignored. The page is reported when it has no internal link at all. It runs in every audit, selected pages included, on every page Asky fetched that answers without a 4xx or 5xx error.

Reported as a warning with medium severity.

How to fix it

View the page source (not the browser inspector) and search for <a href. If your menu and links only appear after scripts run, have the site render them in the HTML the server sends.
Replace buttons or div elements that navigate with a click handler, and href="#" placeholders, by real <a href> links to the pages they lead to.
If the links name the other host form, www or not, point them at the host the page is served from, or use relative paths.
If the page truly has no links, add links in the content to related pages, such as the product an article discusses and the section it belongs to, and give the page your normal header or footer.
To leave it as it is: if the page is a deliberately stripped-down landing page with a single action, mark the issue resolved.

Example

The only way from https://example.com/blog/pricing-guide to the pricing page is a scripted element, which no crawler follows:


<!-- Before -->
<div class="cta" onclick="location.href='/pricing'">See our plans</div>
 
<!-- After -->
<a class="cta" href="/pricing">See our plans</a>

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