Screaming Frog helps Google understand the hierarchy of your site, which is crucial for PageRank’s algorithm. The tool calculates a link score for each page based on the site’s internal linking structure. Higher link scores indicate stronger pages.
What is Link Score?
In Screaming Frog, the link score shows the relative importance of a URL within your site. The higher the link score, the more valuable the page is, based on how many internal links point to it.
How to Find Pages with Low Link Scores
- Crawl Your Site: Start by crawling your site with Screaming Frog. Enter your URL and press "Start."
- Configure Crawl Analysis: Go to Crawl Analysis, configure it, and make sure the option for links is ticked. You can also select auto-analyse to run this every time.
- View Link Scores: After the crawl finishes, look for the Links Go column. This will show the link score for each page.
Identifying Low Link Score Pages
You’ll want to focus on pages that are valuable but have a low link score. For example, a page like "Freelance SEO Services for Watch Shops" might have a low link score despite being important. These pages would benefit from additional internal links.
For smaller sites, you can simply scroll through and identify low link score pages manually. On larger sites, it’s useful to apply filters to focus on key pages.
What to Do Next
If you find pages with a low link score that are valuable, add internal links to them from other pages with higher scores. This helps increase their visibility and importance within your site.
For instance, I recently found some commercial pages with high link scores (96+), but others, like "Living Car at Home" and "Meaningful Companionship," had very few links. These pages need more internal links to boost their value.
Conclusion
Using Screaming Frog’s link score analysis helps you identify which pages need more internal links. Prioritising these pages can improve your site’s SEO by boosting the strength of important content.