Architecture & Internal Links

Why it matters

An orphaned page receives no internal link equity and is discovered only through the sitemap, which is a much weaker discovery and importance signal. Orphans accumulate silently through migrations, redesigns, and content published without being linked from anywhere. They are common on large sites and consistently include pages the business believes are performing.

How we inspect it

We compute reachability across the internal link graph from the homepage, then compare against the sitemap and any URLs with recorded impressions. Anything indexable and unreachable is recorded as orphaned with its discovery source.

Source: Link graph reachability from the homepage, cross-referenced with sitemap and impression data

Why it matters

Click depth is a strong proxy for perceived importance. Pages buried deep are crawled less often and inherit less internal equity, and users reach them less often too. Depth problems usually come from pagination — a product on page fourteen of a listing may be twenty clicks deep even though the catalogue is small.

How we inspect it

We compute the shortest crawlable path from the homepage to every URL and cross-reference depth against commercial priority and impression data.

Source: Shortest-path computation across the internal link graph

Why it matters

Internal linking is the only significant ranking input you control entirely, and on most sites it is distributed by accident. The typical pattern is that the newest blog post gets linked from everywhere while the page that actually generates revenue is linked only from the navigation. Redistributing internal links is among the fastest interventions in SEO because it requires no new content and no external cooperation.

How we inspect it

We compute inbound internal links per URL, weight them by the authority of the linking page, and identify pages that mention a priority page's target topic in body content without linking to it — the actionable opportunity set.

Source: Internal link graph weighted against commercial priority and topical relevance

Why it matters

A crawler follows href attributes on anchor elements. A div with a click handler is not a link, no matter how it behaves for a mouse user — and it is not reachable by keyboard either, so this is simultaneously an accessibility failure. Sites built as single-page applications routinely ship navigation that is invisible to crawlers and to screen readers alike.

How we inspect it

We compare navigation markup in the initial HTML response against the rendered DOM, checking that links are anchor elements with resolvable href attributes rather than JavaScript click handlers or button elements.

Source: Raw HTML versus rendered DOM comparison of navigation components

Why it matters

Breadcrumbs do three useful things at once: they give users an escape route upward, they add consistent internal links to category pages, and they replace the raw URL in search results with a readable hierarchy. They are cheap to implement and on deep catalogue sites they materially improve both crawl paths and click-through.

How we inspect it

We detect breadcrumb components on deep templates and validate any accompanying BreadcrumbList structured data against schema.org requirements.

Source: Breadcrumb component detection plus BreadcrumbList schema validation