Link Score: What It Means and How to Improve It
Link score explained simply: learn what it measures, why it matters, and how to improve weak pages.
Link Score is Screaming Frog’s 0–100 metric for estimating the relative importance of pages based on a site’s internal linking structure. It works similarly to an internal PageRank-style calculation: pages receive more score when important, well-linked pages point to them.
The important catch is that Link Score is a relative metric, not a universal grade. A score of 70 on one website does not automatically mean the page is stronger than a score of 50 on another.
What Is Link Score?
When a website has hundreds or thousands of pages, it can be surprisingly difficult to see which pages are actually receiving enough internal link support.
That is where Link Score becomes useful. Screaming Frog introduced the metric to estimate the relative importance of individual URLs from their internal linking relationships, using a 0–100 scale that makes the underlying calculation easier to interpret.
Think of your website as a city. Each page is a destination, and each internal link is a road. A page linked from several important, well-connected destinations is easier to reach and receives more of the site’s internal authority in the model.
It is not simply a count of links.
A page can have 20 internal links and still have a weaker Link Score than a page with five links if those five links come from more influential pages within the site architecture.
Link Score is best understood as a measure of internal link importance, not a measure of overall page quality.
That distinction prevents one of the most common mistakes: treating the number as a universal “good” or “bad” score.
Why Does Link Score Matter?
A healthy internal linking structure helps visitors discover related content, while also helping Google’s systems understand the relationships between pages. Google recommends linking important pages from relevant pages elsewhere on the same site and using concise, descriptive anchor text.
Link Score gives you a practical way to inspect that structure at scale.
Imagine an online store with 500 products. The site’s most valuable category pages may have excellent navigation, but a handful of high-margin products buried several clicks deep might receive very little contextual internal linking.
Those pages can become invisible in the site’s architecture even though the business considers them extremely important.
Link Score can help expose that mismatch.
It Finds Pages That Look Important to You but Not to Your Site Structure
Suppose a guide is a major business resource, but only one old blog post links to it. Its content may be excellent, yet its internal-link position is weak.
A low score does not prove the page is bad. Instead, it raises a better question:
“Have we given this page enough meaningful connections from the rest of the site?”
That is a much more useful diagnosis.
It Helps Prioritize Internal-Linking Work
Large sites can easily produce hundreds of possible linking opportunities. Trying to fix everything at once usually leads nowhere.
Link Score lets you identify relatively weak pages and then combine that information with business importance, traffic, conversions, and topical relevance.
A low-scoring page that nobody cares about may not deserve immediate attention. A low-scoring product, service page, or cornerstone guide probably does.
How Does Link Score Work?
The calculation is based on how Link Score flows through internal links.
Screaming Frog first identifies eligible URLs. These are internal, non-redirect, non-canonical URLs that meet the tool’s criteria for participating in the calculation. Each eligible URL receives an initial share of the score before the system repeatedly distributes score through the link graph.
The underlying formula uses a damping coefficient of 0.85, meaning the calculation models score flowing through internal links while retaining a baseline amount for every eligible URL. Screaming Frog performs 10 iterations before producing the final values.
That sounds complicated, but the practical idea is simple:
Important pages can pass more score to the pages they link to.
The number of outgoing links matters too. A source page does not simply hand its entire influence to every destination.
For example, imagine two pages with similar Link Scores. Page A links to five important pages, while Page B links to 50. All else being equal, the influence passed through each individual link can be diluted on Page B because its link equity is spread across more destinations.
Which Links Count?
Screaming Frog’s Link Score calculation considers qualifying links such as standard href links, redirects and canonicals, subject to its eligibility rules. Self-links and duplicate links between the same source and destination are not counted in the same way as separate unique relationships, while nofollow links do not pass Link Score in the model.
Redirects and canonicalized URLs can also be bypassed so that the destination receives the relevant link relationships.
That matters when auditing an older site because seemingly harmless technical decisions can change the shape of the internal-link graph.
Link Score vs. Other Useful Link Metrics
Link Score becomes much more valuable when you stop treating it as a standalone number.
| Metric | What it tells you | Best use |
| Link Score | Relative importance from the internal linking graph | Finding under-supported pages |
| Unique Inlinks | How many distinct pages link to a URL | Measuring internal link coverage |
| Unique Outlinks | How many distinct destinations a page links to | Understanding link distribution |
| Crawl Depth | How many clicks a page is from the crawl starting point | Finding deeply buried content |
| External backlinks | Links from other websites | Assessing external authority and discovery |
Screaming Frog specifically recommends looking at Unique Inlinks alongside Link Score when auditing internal linking. A page with few unique inlinks is an obvious candidate for investigation, but Link Score adds another layer by considering the strength and structure of the pages providing those links.
This is why “get more internal links” is an incomplete strategy.
The better question is: Which pages should link to which other pages, and why?
What Is a Good Link Score?
There is no universal passing grade.
Screaming Frog maps the underlying values to a relative 1–100 scale, with the strongest page in the analyzed set receiving 100 and the weakest receiving 1. As the size and structure of a site change, the distribution of scores changes too.
That makes rigid rules such as “anything below 50 is bad” unreliable.
Some practical guides use rough bands such as 0–20 for weakly linked pages and 50+ for relatively strong pages, but even those ranges should be treated as directional rather than absolute. Screaming Frog itself emphasizes that Link Score is relative to the site being analyzed.
A much smarter approach is to compare similar pages.
For example, if most of your product pages sit between 35 and 60 but one important product page sits at 12, that page deserves attention.
A score of 35 might be perfectly healthy for one site and surprisingly weak for another.
How to Improve Link Score Without Creating a Mess
Improving Link Score should not mean sprinkling links everywhere.
Internal links work best when they help people move naturally from one piece of information to the next. Google recommends descriptive, relevant anchor text and encourages site owners to connect important pages from other relevant pages.
Start With Your Most Important Pages
Create a short priority list: major commercial pages, cornerstone guides, high-converting resources, or pages you consider strategically important.
Then check whether those pages are actually supported by the rest of your site.
This often reveals an awkward truth: companies spend enormous effort creating an “important” page and almost no effort making it easy to reach.
Add Contextual Links From Strong Pages
Look for established pages that naturally discuss the subject of the target page.
Suppose you have a detailed guide on choosing running shoes. An older article about marathon training, recovery, or running injuries might provide an ideal contextual path to that guide.
The connection should make sense to a reader first.
Google’s guidance likewise recommends relevant internal links and anchor text that clearly communicates where the link leads.
Improve Anchor Text
“Click here” tells a reader almost nothing.
“How to choose running shoes” tells them exactly what they will find.
Descriptive anchor text provides context for humans and helps systems understand the relationship between the source page and destination.
The goal is not to force the same wording everywhere. Natural variation is usually more useful than repetitive, mechanical phrasing.
Reduce Link Isolation
A valuable page with only one obscure internal link is effectively living on an island.
Look for opportunities to connect related guides, category pages, product pages, glossary entries and supporting articles into meaningful topic clusters.
Google explicitly recommends that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.
Be Careful With Sitewide Links
Navigation, footers, sidebars and other repeated elements can create huge numbers of internal links.
That does not mean every important page should be added to every template.
A better structure combines navigational links with contextual links, so the strongest relationships are reinforced where they make sense.
A Simple Link Score Audit Workflow
You do not need to spend an afternoon staring at a spreadsheet.
Step 1: Crawl the Site
Run a crawl in Screaming Frog and allow Crawl Analysis to complete. Link Score is populated as part of that post-crawl analysis.
Step 2: Sort Pages by Link Score
Look for pages with surprisingly low values, particularly pages that are important to the business.
Do not fix the lowest score automatically. A thin utility page may be less important than a strategic page with a middling score.
Step 3: Compare With Unique Inlinks
A low Link Score paired with very few unique inlinks is a strong signal that the page deserves investigation.
Then identify plausible source pages that already discuss the same subject.
Step 4: Check Crawl Depth and Relevance
A page can have plenty of links but still sit in an awkward part of the architecture.
Check how far it is from the site’s starting point and whether the links leading to it make sense.
Step 5: Add the Fewest Links That Solve the Problem
You rarely need 30 new links.
Often, three carefully chosen contextual links from relevant pages are more useful than dozens of generic links scattered across the website.
Step 6: Re-Crawl and Compare
Link Score is relative to the crawled site, so changes should be evaluated after the internal structure has been updated and the site is crawled again.
The real objective is not a prettier number.
It is a better architecture.
Common Link Score Mistakes
Mistaking Link Score for a Universal Authority Grade
It is not.
Link Score is a tool-specific internal metric based on your site’s linking graph, not a standardized score shared across the web.
Adding Links Just to Raise the Number
This is perhaps the most counterproductive approach.
If a link does not help a reader understand a topic or navigate to something useful, adding it merely to influence a metric creates clutter rather than a stronger site structure.
Ignoring Important Pages With Moderate Scores
A score that looks “okay” can still be disappointing when compared with similar pages.
Relative comparisons are often more revealing than chasing an arbitrary threshold.
Overlooking Anchor Text
Two links can point to the same destination but provide very different context.
Google recommends anchor text that is descriptive, concise and relevant rather than vague or empty.
Treating All Links as Equal
A link from an important, relevant page can have a very different role in your site’s architecture from a link buried in an unrelated page with dozens of destinations.
The structure matters, not just the raw count.
What Link Score Cannot Tell You
This is the part many simplified explanations leave out.
Link Score cannot tell you whether a page is accurate, useful, persuasive or commercially successful. It also cannot tell you whether visitors love the page, whether its information is current, or whether it satisfies the reason someone arrived there.
A brilliantly structured page can still be poor content.
Likewise, an excellent page can have a weak Link Score because the internal architecture around it has not caught up.
Use the metric as a diagnostic instrument, not a verdict.
The goal is not to maximize Link Score; it is to build an internal linking structure that reflects the importance and relationships of your content.
That mindset produces better decisions.
FAQ
What does Link Score measure?
Link Score measures the relative importance of eligible pages based on their internal linking relationships. Screaming Frog expresses the resulting values on a 1–100 scale for easier interpretation.
Is a higher Link Score always better?
A higher score indicates greater relative importance within the analyzed site’s internal link graph, but it does not automatically mean the page is better content or more valuable to users.
What is a good Link Score?
There is no universal ideal score. Because the metric is relative to the site’s own structure, compare similar pages and look for important pages that are unusually weak.
How can I increase Link Score?
Add relevant internal links from appropriate, well-connected pages, improve descriptive anchor text, and make important content easier to reach. Google recommends linking important pages from relevant content elsewhere on your site.
Does Link Score measure backlinks from other websites?
No. Screaming Frog’s Link Score is designed around internal linking relationships within the crawled site. External backlinks are a separate concept and require different metrics and analysis.
Key Takeaways
- Link Score is a Screaming Frog metric for estimating relative page importance from internal links.
- It uses a 1–100 relative scale, so scores should be compared within the same site rather than treated as universal grades.
- A low score can reveal an important page that is poorly supported by the site’s internal architecture.
- Unique inlinks, crawl depth and Link Score work better together than any single metric alone.
- Good internal links should be useful to readers, relevant to the surrounding content and paired with descriptive anchor text.
- Adding links solely to manipulate a score can create clutter and does not solve the underlying architectural problem.
- The best Link Score strategy is to make your site’s internal structure reflect what matters most to your readers and your business.
Additional Resources
- What Is Link Score: A detailed explanation of the metric, its calculation, eligible URLs, link-flow rules and how the 1–100 scale is produced.
