One of the practices that tends to favor search engine positioning is the generation of links on a website. In general, link building , both external and internal, gives authority to a domain and favors a hierarchical structure of the page. Briefly explained, external backlinks are the links that link to your website or any of its links or content. While internal backlinks is the generation of internal links that point to our own pages, in a way that facilitates navigation. It is thus understood that the role of a good internal link building is in the hands of SEO experts . Throughout this article, we will show, first, how to detect all the internal links on our website with the Screaming Frog tool . And second, how to visualize them with Gephi in such a way that they give a global vision, with which the structure and hierarchy of all the internal links of a website can be easily identified . Index of contents 1. Before using Gephi: detect and analyze internal links with Screaming Frog.
There are numerous tools with which it is possible to see the link structure of a web page. In this case, we will use Screaming Frog, a program that can be downloaded for free, both for Windows, Linux or Mac, and that allows us to track the entire structure of a domain, from CSS, HTML, PHP, etc. For this example, we have used the paid version, although the free one offers us a collection of up to 500 URLs. Now, what interests us with Screaming Frog is to see what our internal number list links are so that we can later visualize them with Gephi. For this, it is enough to put the URL that interests us in the search engine above. screaming-frog-internal-links Once 100% of the data has been loaded (a process that will take several minutes, depending on the size of the web), we look at the 'Internal' tab. This is where all our internal links are . To make data handling easier and display more specific and detailed, we will filter by HTML (this option is only available in the paid version, but the database can also be cleaned later, using filters).
When they finish their crawl, we export them as shown in the following image: download-links-screamingfrog Before importing the data into Gephi , the spreadsheet needs to be cleaned: Delete the first row that contains 'All Links'. Delete the first column, 'Type'. Rename column 'Destination' to 'Target' Delete the rest of the columns. If you prefer, you can leave other columns such as the status code or the anchor text (anchor text). This will depend on the data you prefer to display on the chart. In any case, the fields that interest us now are 'Source' and 'Target'. Data-internal-links-base As mentioned before, if you're using the free version of Screaming Frog, you'll also need to do some data cleaning to filter images, CSS, and JavaScript files. In this way, we will leave only HTML. 2. Import the internal link data to Gephi When the database with all the internal links is organized and structured, it will be time to import them into Gephi . To do this, we will follow the following steps: We open Gephi and select.