How to diagnose and fix internal links at scale using SEO tools

Executive overview

Large sites accumulate thousands of broken, redirected, or miscanonicalised internal links that silently bleed authority. Two tools — Semrush Site Audit and Sitebulb — surface these issues at scale and pinpoint which require individual fixes versus a single template change.

Most internal link problems on large sites reduce to a handful of template-level fixes.

Key issues to audit for in Semrush Site Audit

• Broken internal links prevent link equity passing; fix these first
• Pages with too many outgoing internal links dilute authority
• Internal links to nofollow pages waste crawl and equity
• Internal links blocked by robots.txt are invisible to crawlers
• Orphan pages have no internal links pointing to them — no equity, low crawlability
• Links with no anchor text (often header logos) miss keyword-relevance signals
• Pages with excessive click depth are harder to crawl and rank

Where Sitebulb adds diagnostic depth

• Flags internal redirected links — often fixable in two or three template changes despite hundreds of instances
• Identifies pages with only one followed internal link (under-linked important pages)
• Surfaces canonicals pointing to a different internal URL — frequently a single template fix resolves all occurrences
• Shows URLs receiving both follow and nofollow internal links simultaneously

How to approach fixes at scale

• Prioritise broken links — they are complete equity dead-ends
• Before counting individual URLs to fix, identify whether the issue is template-driven
• A single code change to one template can resolve hundreds of occurrences in one shot
• Use both tools together; each surfaces issues the other may miss