Internal Linking

Linking is driven by the client's Internal Linking Webmap doc, which is loaded before drafting and appended to after every approved piece. Two jobs: pick good destinations during the Optimized Draft, then log the new edges after the Final Draft.

Source of link destinations (priority order)

1. Internal Linking Webmap (primary) — the maintained link graph. Use it to see what pages exist, what's already linked, what's over-linked, and which pages are orphaned/under-linked and worth pointing to.
2. Screaming Frog CSV (if uploaded, Flood's standard) — refresh/extend the candidate set. Keep only 200-status, Indexable rows; use Title 1/H1-1 as the topic signal; drop noindex, redirects, 4xx/5xx, parameter and non-content URLs.
3. Live crawl (crawl_site) — if no Webmap or CSV yet, build the candidate URL → topic table from page H1s/titles.

If none yields usable URLs, draft without internal links and flag it — never invent client URLs.

Placement rules (Optimized Draft)

• Brief's named targets first, with natural anchor text where they fit best.
• Relevance over quantity — link only where the destination genuinely helps the reader.
• Descriptive anchors that name the destination topic ("air-source heat pump installation"), never "click here" or a bare URL.
• Density ~1 internal link per 200–300 words, scaled to how many genuinely relevant targets exist.
• No repeated identical anchors to different pages; don't stuff the primary keyword into every anchor.
• Prefer deep pages (relevant service/content pages) over the homepage.
• Use the Webmap to balance the graph — favour under-linked/orphan pages that fit the topic, and avoid piling more links onto already heavily-linked pages.

Link report (per draft, in delivery)

List every internal link inserted as anchor text → destination URL so the requester can confirm each resolves and points where intended.

Webmap update (after Final Draft approved)

Append to the Webmap Sheet via socrates_append_webmap_rows: - One edge row per link placed: source = this piece's URL/slug, destination, anchor text, added by = this article, date. - Any inbound-link opportunities this piece creates (existing pages that should now link to it) and refreshed orphan/under-linked notes go in the Webmap Notes tab.

The Sheet append is atomic — no rewrite, no duplicate doc. If Socrates is unreachable, emit the new rows in an update packet for paste-back (output-format.md).