"Cited on" back-links: two-way links between evidence records and the pages that cite them

Harvested 2026-10-27 10:55Z (skills harvest). Trigger: the project lead asked (WhatsApp 10:44 GMT 27 Oct) that every page citing a piece of evidence links to it AND every evidence page lists the pages that link to it. Complements orphan-pages-click-depth (reachability) and glossary-definition-pages (anchor text); this skill is the reverse link from record to citer. Tool: tools/cited_on_audit.py (stdlib, written this run).

What the evidence shows

• Google Search Central, "Link best practices" (read): Google can only reliably crawl a link that is an <a> element with an href. Links in other forms, or <a> tags that work only via script events, "won't be parsed". Links JavaScript inserts are fine as long as the final markup is <a href>. Anchor text should be descriptive and concise and make sense out of context.
• seoClarity, five internal-linking case studies (vendor's own clients, read; their numbers, not checked by us):
• A large retailer added internal links to under-linked pages and gained 9.5k organic visits a week within three weeks (about +150k a year) to the newly linked pages.
• An e-commerce brand ran a split test: control categories vs test categories, with deep (level 3–4) pages getting new links. The test groups gained +24% organic traffic.
• A retailer linked top sales pages and gained +23% traffic. A marketplace that added links straight away saw a 100% jump in discovered keywords.
• Common thread: the gains landed on pages that were deep or weakly linked before. That describes most single evidence records.
• Wikipedia's "What links here" (practice, not a study): the reference model for a record that lists everything citing it. Wikipedia keeps it as a hidden tool page. On a small evidence site, the list belongs on the record page itself, where readers and crawlers can both see it.
• No published heritage-site case study with numbers was found for back-link lists. Treat the traffic effect as an expectation from the internal-linking evidence above, not a measured result.

How to do it (smallest version that works)

1. One source of truth. The citer pages already contain links of the form <a href="/research/evidence/ev-NNNN-.../">. At build time, scan every built page for links to evidence records and build a reverse map, {record: [citing pages]}. Never maintain the lists by hand; they rot the first time another worker edits a page.
2. Render a "Cited on" block on each record, below the transcript, interpretation and holding place: - <h2>Cited on</h2>, then a <ul> of plain <a href> links. Use each citing page's own <title>/H1 as the anchor text, never "click here". - Group by section (Wales, Argentina, Research, Timeline) once a record has more than 6 citers. - Show the count ("Cited on 4 pages") so a reader can see at a glance which records the case rests on. - Sort by section, then title, so the order is stable between builds and diffs stay small.
3. Forward links stay contextual: keep the in-text link at the sentence that uses the record (catalogue ID as part of the anchor text, e.g. "EV-0412 (RCAHMW record, 1988)"). The preview pop-up is a bonus layer on top of a real href, never a replacement for it.
4. Crawlability guard: no <span data-href>, no onclick-only links, no links only inside the pop-up JSON. The audit flags these.
5. Records cited nowhere are orphans. Either link them from the right theme page, or list them on the catalogue index so they stay one click deep.
6. Check after every build: run the audit and fix any record whose "Cited on" list is missing a citer before calling the build done.
7. Measure: Search Console → Pages → filter /research/evidence/. Note indexed counts and clicks before the change and 4 and 8 weeks after. Add one line to the annotations log on the day it ships.

Tool

python3 tools/cited_on_audit.py --sitemap cedwyn.bucklerfamily.estate --max 6000 --json a temporary folder/cited.json - Reads every page and builds the reverse map for paths matching --target (default /(evidence|artifact)s?/). - Prints the records whose page lacks a link back to a citer, the records cited nowhere, and the pages carrying uncrawlable links. - --dir <built_site> --base <url> runs it offline on a local build, which takes seconds. Prefer this. - Live crawl note: Cedwyn's sitemap lists 5,137 URLs, 2,765 of which mention evidence/catalogue (read 27 Oct). At 0.3 s per page a full live crawl takes about 25–30 minutes. Run it detached, or use --dir on a shallow clone of the built output. - Tested on a 4-page fixture: it caught 1 missing back-link and 1 uncrawlable data-href.

How we apply it to Cedwyn

• Scope today: the 24 archive-intake records (the 1988 press cuttings, RCAHMW NA/GL/88/49 and NA/GL/89/208, the 1974 H.J. Thomas plan) and then every existing EV- record. the project lead asked for "the cited on lists will work across all artifacts".
• The 1974 plan and the 1988 RCAHMW report cite each other (the project lead, 10:46). That needs record-to-record links both ways, as well as page-to-record links. A "Related records" block, separate from "Cited on", keeps the two lists distinct.
• Generate the block in the build step that already renders artifact pages (the halves.py / section build). Do not hand-edit 2,700 pages; one template change covers them all.
• The money link stays on every record as it is now (the /ebooks/ strip). "Cited on" adds reading depth; it is not a sales block.
• Sources: developers.google.com ; seoclarity.net ; en.wikipedia.org

Raw Markdown: cited-on-backlinks-evidence-records.md · version and changes: changelog · machine index: agents.json