Link Mapping: Working with the Canvas

The canvas is the link map itself. Every page on the client's site is a node, every editorial internal link is a line between two nodes, and topic clusters appear as colored regions grouping their pages together. It's where you read the structure, fix page types, inspect individual links, and plan new ones.

For getting pages onto the map in the first place, see Crawling Your Site.

Where to find it

Open a client and click Link Mapping in the sidebar. The canvas fills the screen with the map sidebar docked on the left. Collapse the sidebar with the panel icon in its header, and reopen it with the button that appears at the top left of the canvas.

Moving around

• Pan: drag with the middle or right mouse button. On a touch device, drag with one finger.
• Zoom: scroll, or pinch on a touch device. The zoom buttons and fit view button sit in the control cluster at the top left of the canvas.
• Select: click a node to select it. Drag with the left mouse button on empty canvas to draw a selection box. Hold Shift and click to add nodes to the selection.
• Move pages: drag a selected node, or drag any node in a multi-selection to move the whole group. Drag a cluster region to move the cluster and its pages together.
• Delete: press Delete or Backspace with pages selected, or use Delete Selected in the sidebar footer. You'll get a confirmation first.

A message strip at the bottom of the canvas confirms what's selected and what you can do with it. The minimap at the bottom right gives you a bird's-eye view on larger maps, using the same node colors as the map legend.

The sidebar

The sidebar header holds the how-to guide, Link map settings, and the collapse button. Below it is the search box, and below that two tabs.

Topic Clusters tab

Three actions sit at the top:

• Crawl: opens the Crawl Manager. See Crawling Your Site.
• Plan: generates or opens the Linking Plan.
• Re-layout Map: recalculates the whole layout and re-groups pages into their clusters. Use it when the map gets tangled after a big import, or after you've reassigned a lot of pages.

Two visibility toggles follow:

• Cross-Category Links: hide links that run between different categories to see each category's internal structure on its own.
• Missing Links (N): hide or show the recommended links your Linking Plan has flagged but you haven't built yet. The toggle only appears when there are some.

The rest of the tab is the topic cluster tree. See Page Types & Clusters for how to build and use it.

Map Key tab

Map Statistics counts what's on the map: total pages, total links, reciprocal links (counted as pairs), and one-way links. Planned, broken, duplicate, and missing links are counted too when any exist. Below that sits a count of pages of each type.

Legend decodes the canvas. Node colors map to the eight page types, and line styles map to link states:

A Test badge on a node means a running SEO test owns that page.

Finding a page

Type into the search box at the top of the sidebar. Matching pages appear underneath with their type dot, title, and URL. Click a result and the canvas pans and zooms to that page.

The + button beside the search box opens the Add page dialog for adding a single URL by hand.

Inspecting a page

Every node shows its page type, title, URL path, and status, with buttons to View details, Refresh page data, and Delete. There's also a copy button on the URL.

Click View details to open Page Details, which gathers everything RankNest knows about that URL:

• Basic Information: title, URL, topic group, and when the page was created and last updated. Edit Details lets you change the title, URL, page type, status, and topic group. Open page object jumps to the URL's full record in Pages.
• SEO Information: meta description, meta keywords, H1 and H2 tags, word count, and HTTP status code.
• Link Information: expandable Incoming Links and Outgoing Links lists, each naming the other page and the anchor text used. Broken Links and Redirected Links sections appear when the page links to something that's unreachable or has moved.
• Top Queries: the page's top non-brand Search Console queries with clicks and average position, synced nightly. Requires a connected Search Console property.

Inspecting a link

Click any line to open Link Details. It shows the link's status, the source and target pages, and every anchor text used.

• Reciprocal links get From: tabs at the top so you can inspect each direction separately.
• A Duplicate outbound links detected callout appears when the source page links to the target more than once, with the number of occurrences. Keep one link and remove the rest; the next crawl clears the matching Hygiene recommendation automatically.
• Anchor vs. Target Queries compares this link's anchor text against the queries the target page ranks for, showing which it covers and which it doesn't. Use the unmatched list as inspiration when rewriting an anchor.

Where several links overlap on screen, clicking opens a small picker that lists each one, so you can choose the one you meant.

Clicking a red dashed missing link opens a different dialog: it names the recommendation type, explains why the link is worth adding, and offers View in Linking Plan to jump to the full recommendation with AI anchor text suggestions. See Recommendation Types.

Drawing a planned link

You can plan a link before you build it. Hover a node to reveal its connection handles, then drag from a handle on the source page to the target page.

The new link appears as an amber dashed planned line, and RankNest also creates a pending recommendation in the Linking Plan and a task for the client so it doesn't get forgotten. Once you add the real link on the live site and re-crawl, it's detected and marked implemented.

Deleting pages

Select one or more pages and press Delete, or use the delete button on a node. The confirmation reminds you to run a rescan afterwards so the Linking Plan drops stale links and recommendations.

Tick Never re-add this page in the confirmation to stop the page being brought back by a future crawl or auto-import. Ignored pages are listed under Link map settings, where you can Un-ignore them.

Tips

• Turn Cross-Category Links off on a busy map. Seeing one category at a time makes structural gaps far easier to spot.
• Purple lines are the fastest cleanup win on any map. One page linking to the same target several times is usually accidental, and each fix takes seconds.
• Use Re-layout Map after a big import rather than dragging pages around by hand. Rearrange afterwards if you want a custom arrangement.
• If a node's data looks stale, use its Refresh page data button instead of re-crawling the whole site.

Troubleshooting

Dragging on the canvas draws a box instead of panning. That's the selection box. Pan with the middle or right mouse button, or use the minimap.

A page shows as orphaned but it's in the main menu. Only editorial, in-content links are mapped, so a page linked purely from navigation shows no incoming links here. It isn't undiscoverable. It just has no in-content links pointing at it.

Nodes overlap and the map is unreadable. Click Re-layout Map. If it's still dense, collapse the sidebar for more room and hide cross-category links.

I can't drag a link between two nodes on mobile. Drawing links is disabled on small screens. Use a desktop browser for editing the map.

A node's title won't save. A running SEO test owns that page and its title is locked. Edit the test instead.

Related

• Link Mapping Overview
• Crawling Your Site
• Page Types & Clusters
• Recommendation Types
• Page Inventory