We use the Screaming Frog SEO spider website crawler to audit our sites on a regular basis. Recently I've taken a look at data regarding the number of pages on our sites as compared to the number of pages linked to on other sites.

For example, in the most recent crawl of the GPWA website, 114,343 pages were found. There are actually more pages on the site than that, because that crawl only visited publicly available pages, and not pages in private forums that require members to be logged in.

That same crawl showed there were links to 41,046 pages on other sites. For example, there were links to 567 pages on the GPWAtimes.org website.

That means, on the GPWA website, there are .359 external pages (calculated as 41,046/114,343) linked to for every internal page on the GPWA website, so the ratio is 35.9%.

I know that this sort of internal pages to external link ratio can vary substantially based on the characteristics of a site. For example, I also operate a site that covers regulation of the gaming industry (GamingRegulation.com). That site contains 2,848 pages and has links to 33,558 external pages. So, there are 11.78 external pages linked to for every internal page - a ratio of 1,178%, which is more than 30 times as large as the GPWA website ratio. The much larger ratio is due to extensive linking to outside resources, especially news stories of interest from a regulatory perspective.

For today's poll I ask about the ratio that applies to your most important website. Do you have a limited or extensive number of external links compared with the number of pages on your site? Does that ratio make sense to you, or do you think it is larger or smaller than it should ideally be?

Michael