Feature guide · 3 minute read
Pages vs Links
Pages tells you about a crawled URL. Links tells you which page points to which destination. Use them together to move from a page-level finding to the relationship that needs attention.
Best for choosing the right view before investigating a crawl finding
21-second workflow
One broken page. Two useful views.
A completed public fixture crawl. The 404 destination is intentional. The final selection identifies services/seo as the page containing the broken link; switching views does not run another crawl.
What happens in the demo
Inspect the page result
In Pages, select 4xx Client Errors and then the broken-target URL. Its row reports 404 and Blocked.
Clear the issue filter
Restore the page list before switching views. This clears the filter, not the crawl results.
Switch to Links
The table now shows Source URL and Destination URL. These are relationships between pages, not a second list of page-level results.
Find the broken relationship
Select Broken internal links in the Issues panel. The fixture has one matching link, from services/seo to broken-target.
Read destination, then source
Select Destination URL to recognize the same 404 page, then Source URL to identify the page that contains the link.
Choose the view by the question.
- Pages: what happened to this URL?
- Review the response code, indexability, canonical, title, description, headings, or content of a crawled page. The URL column identifies the page those fields describe.
- Links: where does this relationship come from?
- Read Source URL beside Destination URL. Use link details such as anchor text, link type, and location to understand how the source points to the destination.
A missing title belongs to the page being reviewed. A broken internal link also needs its source identified, because that is where the reference may need updating.
Do not confuse source with destination.
In this fixture, services/seo contains a link to broken-target. The 404 describes the destination response; it does not mean the source page also returns 404.
- Source URL: the page containing the discovered link.
- Destination URL: the URL the link points to.
- Status Code in Links: the destination response available from the crawl.
- Anchor Text: the link label, when present. An image or another link type may not have ordinary text.
For a specific destination, use the source-and-destination lookup workflow. It shows how to copy a URL from Pages and filter Destination URL in Links.
The row counts answer different questions.
One source can link to several destinations, and several sources can point to the same destination. Pages and Links therefore need not have matching row counts. A link row is not an additional unique page.
Check the selected view, active issue, and column filters before interpreting the visible total. In the demo, the issue filter is explicitly cleared before opening Links, then Broken internal links narrows the relationship table.
The tables reflect what this crawl discovered within its scope and settings. A destination absent from the current view is not proof that no page links to it.