Where external links enter your site, page by page

Why the total misleads

Backlink checking tools love a headline number. It fits on a dashboard and it moves when a campaign lands.

But equity does not spread by itself. If 70 percent of the domains that point at you land on one old article, that article decides how much reaches the rest of the site, and its outgoing links are the only pipes it has.

Think of a river delta. The size of the river matters less than where it splits. A strong inlet with no channels leaves most of the plain dry.

Start at the other end. Ask which URLs receive links, and only then ask what those pages link to. Our cost table shows that the first answer costs two credits. The hub example shows what that looks like with numbers.

A hypothetical store, to make it concrete

This is an example with invented numbers, not a customer. Picture a store with 420 pages and 640 referring domains.

The inlet list shows that 9 URLs take 80 percent of those domains. Two are old blog posts, one is the home page, and three are product pages that were later redirected to a category.

Now lay your own crawl over it. Both blog posts sit four clicks from the best-selling category, and neither links to it at all. The redirected product pages pass through one hop, which is fine, but the target category links down to nothing but pagination. Short fix, then.

The fix has nothing to do with new links. Add two contextual links from each old post to the category it supports, point the redirected pages straight at their final targets, and recheck after the next monthly refresh.

None of this is a result. It is a worked illustration of a method, built in October 2026 for this page, and your site will differ. Note also that Google's March 2024 core update changed how links are weighed in ways nobody outside Google can itemise, so avoid reading too much into a single before-and-after.