# "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 `` element with an `href`. Links in other forms, or `` tags that work only via script events, "won't be parsed". Links JavaScript inserts are fine as long as the final markup is ``. 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 ``. 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: - `

Cited on

`, then a `