Internal Linking Optimizer: the Claude skill that builds a link plan you can execute
Internal Linking Optimizer is a free Claude skill that maps a site's internal links, finds orphan pages, starved money pages and cluster leaks, corrects anchor text on a 75/25 rule, and outputs a placement table with the exact from-page, to-page, anchor and sentence for every suggested link. Not a lecture about link equity, a plan you execute today. One curl command installs it.
Install it
One command, then give it a Screaming Frog inlinks export or your sitemap.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/internal-linking-optimizer.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lhitches/claude-seo-skills/main/skills/internal-linking-optimizer.md
Then: "Optimise the internal linking on mysite.com, the money page is /services/." No install? Paste the skill file contents into any Claude chat and the same process runs.
What it does, and what you get
Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever most sites ignore. They decide which pages accumulate authority and whether a money page starves while the blog hoards every link.
- The link graph: every contextual body link mapped from a crawl export (complete) or live fetches (sampled, and it says which).
- Cluster health: your hubs and spokes named, scored dense inside and deliberate between, or leaky.
- The seven problems: orphans, starved money pages, missing hub-to-spoke links, one-way clusters, generic anchors, exact-match pileups, and broken plumbing.
- The 75/25 anchor rule: anchors mined from queries the target page already earns impressions for, so they match what Google connects to the page.
- A capped placement table: the top 20 links by impact, each with from-page, to-page, anchor and the exact sentence to place it in.
Real sample output
This excerpt is a genuine run against lawrencehitches.com, 18 of 554 pages sampled live, contextual links only. It found the money page starved by the two biggest hubs on the site.
INTERNAL LINK MAP: lawrencehitches.com
Graph basis: 18 of 554 pages sampled live, 484 contextual links captured. Money page: /ai-seo-consultant/.
- The starved money page: the two biggest hubs on the site, /ai-search/ (84 outbound links) and /claude-for-seo/ (59), send the money page zero links. Every prose link it gets comes from inside its own cluster.
- A one-way rotted cluster: /claude-seo-audit/ sends 13 prose links up into the Claude ecosystem and receives zero back in the sample.
- Broken plumbing: four links on /claude-for-seo/ 301-redirect back to the same page, plus one dead link to a 404. Wasted crawl and wasted equity.
- The plan: 18 placements (capped from 26 candidates), 6 anchor corrections, 4 plumbing fixes, and two live case-study pages found missing from the sitemap.
Excerpt from a real run, 11 July 2026. Full format: cluster health, the seven problems, the top-20 placement table with exact anchors and sentences, orphan rescue, and a not-checked note.
When to use it, and when to use a sibling skill
Use Internal Linking Optimizer for links inside one site. Its siblings handle the map above and the links from outside.
| You want | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| To fix the links inside your own site | Internal Linking Optimizer (this skill) | Placement table with exact anchors and sentence context |
| The cluster architecture the links should follow | Topical Authority Map | Builds the hub-and-spoke plan this skill then wires together |
| Two of your pages competing for one query | Cannibalization Detector | Decides the keeper before you point links at it |
| Links from other sites (backlinks) | Data PR Outreach | Internal links move authority, external links create it |
FAQ
What do I give the Internal Linking Optimizer to start?
Best is a Screaming Frog inlinks export (Bulk Export, Links, All Inlinks), which gives a complete graph. A sitemap URL works too and the skill samples pages live, saying how many of how many it read. It also asks for your money page and, if you have it, a GSC export so anchors come from queries you already rank for.
Why does it cap the plan at 20 placements?
Because 200 rows get ignored and 20 get done. The skill ranks every candidate by target-page value and hands you the highest-impact 20, then says what it left out. Internal linking work that ships beats a comprehensive plan that sits in a tab.
What is the 75/25 anchor rule?
Roughly 75 percent of links to a page use its primary descriptive phrase and close variants, 25 percent use long-tail and natural-sentence anchors. When a GSC export is supplied, the skill mines anchors from queries the target already earns impressions for, because those are the phrases Google has already connected to the page.
Can it prove a page is truly orphaned?
Only from a full crawl export. A sampled graph can miss inbound links from pages it did not fetch, so the skill labels sampled findings as candidates and never overstates them. The export path is always more complete than the live-fetch path, and the report says which one it used.
Created by Lawrence Hitches
Chief of Staff at StudioHawk. I built this library from the processes our 120-person team runs across 500+ client campaigns. Every skill is free and MIT licensed.