Link Graph

The Link Graph analysis tab renders every internal link relationship discovered during a crawl as a force-directed graph. Nodes represent pages, edges represent links, and the layout reveals clusters, orphans, and authority flow at a glance — the kind of structural picture that a flat URL list cannot provide.

Visualization

The graph is rendered on an HTML canvas using d3-force. Each node is a page, each edge is a link between pages. Node size is proportional to the page's link score — its internal authority expressed as a PageRank value scaled 0–100 against the strongest page in the crawl. Pages that accumulate more inbound links from other high-authority pages appear larger; pages with few or no inbound links appear small.

Hover over any node to see a tooltip showing the page URL, its link score, and whether it is orphaned or unreachable. Pan the graph by clicking and dragging on empty space. Zoom in and out with the scroll wheel or trackpad pinch gesture. The visualization respects prefers-reduced-motion: when the user's system is configured to reduce motion, the force simulation settles immediately rather than animating.

Node types

Three visual treatments distinguish pages by their reachability status:

Appearance	Meaning
Solid circle	Linked and reachable. At least one other page links to this page, and there is a navigable path from the crawl's seed URL to reach it.
Hollow circle	Orphan. No other page in the crawl links to this page. It was discovered through the sitemap or another indirect source, but nothing in the site's link structure points to it. Search engines may have difficulty finding it.
Dashed circle	Unreachable from the homepage. Other pages link to it, so it is not orphaned, but there is no continuous path of links from the seed URL to this page. A visitor starting at the homepage cannot reach it by following links alone.

Orphan and unreachable pages are structural issues worth investigating. An orphan page receives no internal link equity and may not appear in search results. An unreachable page has inbound links but is disconnected from the main navigation path — it may be an old page that lost its parent, or part of a section with a broken link in the chain.

Link regions

Every link discovered during a crawl is classified by the region of the page it appears in. This classification drives the "Page copy only" toggle and helps distinguish editorial links from structural ones.

Region	Description
In-content	Links within the main content area of the page — the editorial body, article text, or primary content region.
Navigation	Links in site-wide navigation menus, including top nav, sidebars used for site navigation, and hamburger menus.
Footer	Links in the page footer — typically site-wide links repeated on every page.
Sidebar	Links in sidebar regions that are not part of the primary navigation, such as related-article lists or category menus.
Breadcrumb	Links in breadcrumb trails showing the page's position in the site hierarchy.
Unknown	Links whose containing region could not be determined. This can happen when the page markup does not use semantic elements or ARIA landmarks.

The "Page copy only" toggle filters the graph to show only in-content links, removing navigation, footer, sidebar, breadcrumb, and unknown links from the visualization. This gives a clearer picture of editorial linking — the deliberate links authors placed in their content, rather than the structural links repeated on every page by the site template. It is particularly useful on large sites where navigation links dominate the graph and obscure the content-level link structure.

PageRank

The crawler computes PageRank over the internal link graph of each crawl session. Raw PageRank values sum to 1 across all pages in the session — each page's raw value represents its share of the total internal link authority.

Because raw values are small decimals that are difficult to compare at a glance, Consuela converts them to a link score: PageRank scaled 0–100, where 100 is assigned to the page with the highest raw PageRank in the crawl and every other page is scored relative to it. A link score of 50 means a page has half the internal authority of the strongest page.

Link score is used throughout the interface — as node size in the graph, as a sortable column in the results table, and in the page inspector detail view. It reflects internal link structure only. It is not a prediction of search engine ranking, and it does not account for external backlinks, content quality, or any signal outside the crawled link graph.

Controls

The graph toolbar provides the following controls:

Control	Function
Journey picker	A dropdown listing saved journeys from the Journeys tab. Selecting a journey activates the journey overlay: the route's steps are highlighted in the accent colour with ring markers around each node, edges along the route show their anchor text, and the rest of the graph dims. This makes it easy to trace a multi-step path through the site's link structure and confirm that each step is reachable.
Page copy only	A toggle that filters the graph to in-content links only, excluding navigation, footer, sidebar, breadcrumb, and unknown link regions. See Link regions above for details.
Zoom in / Zoom out	Button controls for stepping the zoom level in and out. Equivalent to scroll-wheel zoom but accessible without a pointing device that supports scroll gestures.
Fit	Resets the viewport to fit the entire graph within the visible canvas area, recentring and rescaling so that all nodes are visible.