Internal links do three jobs at once: they let crawlers find pages, they pass ranking credit around your site, and they tell search engines what each page is about through the words you link with.
They are also entirely under your control, which is what makes them the cheapest improvement available.
The pages nothing links to
An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing at it. It usually still exists in the sitemap, so it may get crawled, but it receives no credit from the rest of the site and no visitor will stumble onto it.
Orphans appear when:
- A campaign landing page is published and never linked.
- A category is removed from the menu, stranding everything under it.
- A blog archive is paginated, and older posts fall off the last page.
- A migration keeps the pages but loses the navigation.
How to find them: crawl your site following links only, then compare that list with your sitemap. Anything in the sitemap that the crawl never reached is an orphan. Rankwell's audit does this comparison for you and flags each one.
Click depth
Click depth is the number of clicks from the homepage to a page, following the shortest path. Pages deeper than three clicks get crawled less often and rank less well, simply because they look less important.
Deep pages are usually a symptom of pagination: if your only path to a post is page 14 of an archive, that post is 15 clicks deep. Category pages, tag pages and "related" links shorten those paths.
Write links people would click
The words inside the link tell search engines what the target page is about.
- Weak: "You can read more about this here."
- Better: "Read the guide to redirect chains."
Use different wording where it fits naturally. Repeating one exact phrase in hundreds of automated links looks manipulated.
Link from strength to need
Your best-linked pages hold the most credit. A link from one of those to a page you want to rank passes some of it along. Look at your most linked pages, then ask which of your important pages are missing from them.
This is why a blog helps a shop: guides attract links, and each guide links to the products it discusses.
A practical routine
- Crawl the site and list orphan pages. Link each from a relevant page, or delete it if it has no purpose.
- List pages deeper than three clicks. Add links from category or hub pages.
- Look at your most linked pages. Are they the pages you actually want to rank? If not, adjust navigation and in-text links.
- Each time you publish, add two or three links from existing pages to the new one. This is the step most people skip.
What Rankwell shows
The site audit builds the link graph from your own pages: it counts inbound internal links per page, works out real click depth from the homepage, lists your most linked pages, and flags orphan pages and anything deeper than three clicks. Because it follows redirects, a link to an old address counts for the page it actually lands on.