Playbook: rebalance internal link distribution

Playbook: rebalance internal link distribution
Median site: top 5% of pages hold 48% of internal links; the bottom 50% share 9% (sample: 119 crawls). Skew starves money pages.

Procedure:
— Step 1: crawl, count unique internal inlinks per URL (dedupe nav/footer template links)
— Step 2: rank pages by inlinks; overlay by traffic/revenue value
— Step 3: find the misfit quadrant — high value, low links. Typical size: 12% of pages ▓▓░░░░░░░░
— Step 4: add 3-5 contextual in-content links to each from relevant high-authority pages
— Step 5: re-crawl 30d later; target median inlinks on the set ↑ from 4 to 11

So what: nav links are noise — they hit every page equally. Count contextual in-content links only, then route them to the high-value/low-link quadrant.