No Contextual Inbound Links

Detects pages whose only internal inbound links come from sitewide chrome (nav, header, footer, sidebar)

Rule ID	links/no-contextual-inbound
Category	Links
Scope	Site-wide
Severity	warning
Weight	4/10

What it checks

Every internal link the crawl finds is recorded with whether its anchor sat inside site chrome - an ancestor <nav>, <header>, <footer> or <aside>. A link from any of those is repeated verbatim on every page of the site, so it carries no signal about what the target page is about or how important it is. A link from body copy does.

This rule counts only the contextual (non-chrome) inbound links per page and warns when that count is zero.

Chrome detection is deliberately strict: only those four landmark elements count. A wrapper named class="post-nav" is not treated as chrome, because misclassifying body copy would turn a genuinely well-linked page into a false warning.

Why the existing link rules miss this

Orphan Pages and Weak Internal Links both count raw inbound links, with no distinction by container. A page linked from the sitewide footer of a 200-page site has 200 inbound links and passes both - while receiving no editorial support at all.

To keep the three rules from reporting the same page twice, this rule speaks only about the gap the other two cannot see: a page is flagged when it has zero contextual inbound links and a raw inbound count at or above the orphan threshold (minInboundLinks, default 2). Below that threshold the page is already reported as an orphan.

The homepage is always skipped - it is reached from every page’s header and footer by design.

Solution

These pages look well-linked but receive no editorial support: every link pointing at them is repeated on every page of the site, so it carries no signal about what the page is about or how important it is. Add links from the body copy of related articles, hub pages, or category descriptions using descriptive anchor text. Sitewide navigation links help discovery, but contextual links are what pass topical relevance and internal link equity.

Options

This rule supports the following configuration options:

Option	Type	Default	Description
minInboundLinks	number	2	Raw inbound-link threshold from links/orphan-pages; only pages at or above it are considered here (below it they are already reported as orphans)
excludePatterns	array	[]	URL patterns to exclude from contextual inbound link detection

Keep minInboundLinks in sync with the same option on Orphan Pages - the two are the same threshold viewed from either side.

Configuration Example

[rule_options."links/no-contextual-inbound"]
minInboundLinks = 2
excludePatterns = ["/tags/", "/authors/"]

Enable / Disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["links/no-contextual-inbound"]

Disable all Links rules

[rules]
disable = ["links/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["links/no-contextual-inbound"]
disable = ["*"]