What does probeo check in your internal link graph?

Probeo maps how your pages link to one another and works out which pages the site itself treats as most important. A page that matters to the business but sits at the edge of the link graph is easy to miss from the CMS. The graph shows where each page actually stands.

What probeo checks

Probeo records, for every page it manages:

• The pages it links to. Each internal link on the page, counted once per target.
• The pages that link to it. The same links read the other way.
• Its score. A PageRank-style score from the whole site’s link structure.
• Its position. Every page in score order, from 1 down, with a percentile where the top page is 100 and the last is 0.

The graph is rebuilt as pages are recrawled, so a link that’s added or removed changes the scores on the next run.

How probeo checks it

Probeo reads every <a href> in the page as a browser renders it. A link counts as internal when it points to the same host, with or without www.. Fragments and query strings are removed, and repeated links to the same page count once.

The scores use the standard PageRank method with a damping factor of 0.85, repeated until the scores stop changing. Only links between pages probeo knows count toward the scores. A page’s percentile also sets how often probeo rechecks it: the top 5% every hour, falling to every two days for pages below the 30th percentile.

What this does not cover

The link graph records links; it doesn’t judge them. Probeo doesn’t report broken links, orphan pages or redirect chains from it, and it doesn’t analyze anchor text. A nofollow link counts the same as any other internal link.

External links aren’t scored. The scores describe your own site’s linking only, not links from other sites, so they aren’t a measure of how search engines rank the page.

Common questions

Is this the same as Google’s PageRank?

It uses the same published method, applied to your site’s internal links only. Google’s ranking draws on links from across the web and much else, so the two numbers aren’t comparable.

Why does a page’s position change when I didn’t touch it?

Every score depends on the whole graph. Adding or removing links anywhere on the site shifts the share each page receives, including pages you didn’t edit.

Why do some pages get rechecked more often than others?

Probeo spends its checks where the site concentrates its links. A page near the top of the graph is rechecked within the hour; one at the bottom within two days.