Internal Pagerank Now Available in Site Crawls

Optimize internal linking strategies with DragonLink Score

Links are an important ranking factor for organic search rankings. This fundamental concept is well-known by SEOs, but it’s all-too-commonly forgotten that this is not only referring to external links from other sites, but also internal links on your own site as well.

Your site’s information architecture and internal linking strategy plays a vital role in both the user experience of site visitors and how search engines view your site.

The way search engines interpret a site’s internal links is perhaps best represented by the original PageRank algorithm. This method for measuring relative importance of web pages, was published all the way back in 1998 and is ultimately responsible for what made Google Google.

In a nutshell, PageRank determines how authoritative a URL is by looking at the quantity and authority of links to this page. The algorithm is recursive in this way, as it determines if a URL is authoritative by seeing if other authoritative URLs (whose authority is determined in the same way) link to it.

Search engines have largely moved past this original concept, but the basic principles of PageRank are still relevant today in 2021. When applied internally to a site, internal PageRank can help you understand your site’s structure, how search engines visualize your site as they crawl it, and identify any potential internal linking or site architecture issues.

Meet DragonLink Score

That’s what today’s new feature launch is all about. DragonLink Score is our implementation of the PageRank algorithm, and it’s now available for every URL in your site crawls.

DragonLink Score is a number logrithmically scored from 0 to 100 measuring the strength of the internal links of each URL on your site.

In addition to the basic concepts of PageRank, additional rules are included to model how Google and other search engines treat internal links:

• Redirected URLs will pass their value on to their targets, but will have a score of 0 themselves.
• The same is also true of non-canonical URLs — if the canonical target points to a different page, the value will flow on to the target but will be 0 for the non-canonical page.
• Links with the rel="no-follow" attribute will not pass value.
• Only HTML content will be included in the calculation. PDFs, images, and other types of files will be ignored.
• Only unique links will be included in the calculation, so only one link from each source URL to target URL will be counted.
• URLs will follow common normalization rules (such as sorting parameter order and removing fragments) before being included in the calculation
• Links from a source URL back to itself will be ignored.

DragonLink Score in Dragon Metrics

You can find DragonLink Score in the Site Auditor, where it’s used to help sort and prioritize which URLs should be fixed first.

It’s also available in the Site Explorer as the default sort order for all URLs.

Just like every other data point included in the crawler, DragonLink Score is available in the Site Explorer filter.

You can also find DragonLink Score in all crawl exports.

How to use DragonLink Score

DragonLink Score is an incredibly powerful metric to assist in SEO efforts. Let’s take a look some ways to leverage it to improve your internal linking strategies:

• If you're consistently seeing high-value pages with low DragonLinks Scores and low-value pages with high DragonLink Scores, it may be time to redesign the entire internal linking structure and information architecture of the site.
• Identify high-value pages with low DragonLink Scores. Consider adding more internal links to these URLs from pages with high DragonLink Scores.
• Take a look at URLs with high DragonLink Scores, and evaluate the outbound links on this page. As this page will pass value on to each link on the page, consider adding new links to other pages you want to increase the value of, or removing links of those that are less important.
• Look for URLs with a high DragonLink Score that don't offer much value to site visitors or search engines. Consider potentially reworking your internal linking structure to change the link focus off of these pages and on to URLs with more value.
• Use DragonLink Score to prioritize which URL should be fixed first (or at all).

There’s far more applications than just these, but even if you just stick to the above you’ll have a great head start on getting your internal links in order.

How are you using DragonLink Score? Give it a try and let us know your unique applications!