# Internal Linking: How We Found 34 Orphan Pages on Our Site **URL:** https://mettevo.com/blog/article/internal-linking-how-we-found-orphan-pages **Published:** 2026-10-09 **Updated:** 2026-10-09 **Author:** Oleg Silin **Category:** Blog | Mettevo > Discover how Mettevo used internal linking analysis to find 34 orphan pages, uncover SEO opportunities, improve site structure, and help search engines discover valuable content. ![Internal Linking](https://stage.mettevo.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Team_reviewing_website_structure…_20261009094553.jpg) --- Internal linking is a practice of connecting pages on the same website with hyperlinks placed inside body content, not navigation menus. It helps search engines discover and rank pages, and it moves ranking authority toward the pages that need it most. On our own site, 34 of 60 crawled pages had none at all. ## TL;DR - Mettevo crawled its own site on August 27, 2026, and 34 of 60 pages sampled, 56.7%, had zero inbound internal links. - The sample covered 57 of the 263 blog articles in the sitemap, not the whole site. - A 5,671-word guide with FAQPage schema was orphaned right alongside older, thinner posts. Length does not protect a page. - Screaming Frog's free tier, connected to Google Analytics and Google Search Console, finds orphan pages in one report. - Fixing this is a monthly habit, not a one-time project: link new posts into old ones, and old ones back. ## Does Internal Linking Help SEO? Yes, in two separable ways. Google's documentation states that the search engine "uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl." That covers discovery, since links are one path a crawler follows to find a page at all, and relevance, since the pages linking to a URL say something about what it covers. [Internal linking](https://mettevo.com/seo/linkbuilding) is the part a site owner controls completely. It sits inside the broader practice of on-page SEO, next to titles, headers, and content structure. A link is just another on-page element. It either points at your other pages, carrying context forward, or it does not exist, and that context goes nowhere. ## What Is an Internal Linking Strategy? An internal linking strategy is a deliberate system for connecting pages, not a habit of adding a link whenever one happens to fit. It sets rules: which pages act as hubs, which topics connect to which other topics, and how new content gets linked to old content on publication day. Without that system, link distribution just follows whatever the site's content management system (CMS) templates already do, author bios and category archives, nothing more deliberate than that. A working strategy usually starts from site structure: which pages are the pillars, which are supporting detail, and how many clicks separate the homepage from each one. Our own practical guide to website structure for SEO covers that layer in more depth. Internal linking fills in the connections once the structure exists. It is not a substitute for having one. ## The Orphan Page Problem, Measured on Our Own Site We ran this audit on mettevo.com before writing about it anywhere else. The crawl covered 60 pages on August 27, 2026: 57 blog articles, the homepage counted under both its slash and non-slash URL variants, and the about-us page. Of those 60 pages, 34, or 56.7%, carried zero inbound internal links from any other page in the sample. This is not a client site described secondhand. It is ours, measured with the same method covered in the audit section below. Sixty pages is a sample, not the whole site. To size that sample honestly we pulled the sitemap separately: 416 URLs, of which 263 are blog articles under /blog/article/ and 142 sit outside /blog entirely. The crawl therefore reached about 22% of the blog and, apart from the homepage and about-us page, none of the service, location or case-study pages. The two homepage variants are one page counted twice, so the sample is closer to 59 distinct pages. The crawl and the sitemap pull are eighteen days apart, so a few articles published in between are in the sitemap but were never crawlable candidates. We are not claiming 34 of 60 holds across the other 356 pages, only for the part we measured. Two examples show what that 56.7% actually contains. One orphan is a 5,671-word guide on AI Overviews and SEO, published with FAQPage schema and structured for exactly the kind of answer-engine visibility this article is about, and it had not received a single internal link by the time of the crawl. Length and schema markup do not protect a page from being orphaned. The second example is a near-duplicate pair. "Best Firefox SEO Plugin Tools for Marketers in 2026" carries 120 inbound internal links, just short of the site's top 20 most-linked pages, while a second, separately written article covering the same Firefox SEO plugin topic sits at zero. Same subject, same site, opposite outcomes, because one happened to get linked early and the other never did. Link concentration runs the other way just as hard. The 20 most-linked pages on the site average 139 inbound internal links each, led by the [author bio page](https://mettevo.com/blog/author/oleg-silin) at 242 because every article's byline links to it, and the blog index at 234. Navigation and boilerplate, not editorial choices, do most of the linking here. That is what happens by default on any site where internal links are left to templates instead of writers. ## How Do You Find Orphan Pages on Your Own Site? Finding orphan pages does not require Mettevo's internal crawler. The most reproducible path for most teams uses Screaming Frog SEO Spider, a desktop crawler with a dedicated report built for exactly this question, paired with a site's XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console accounts. [Screaming Frog's own tutorial on finding orphan pages](https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/tutorials/find-orphan-pages/) lays out the steps: 1. In Configuration > Spider > Crawl, turn on "Crawl Linked XML Sitemaps" so the crawler checks your sitemap against what it finds by following links. 2. In Configuration > API Access, Screaming Frog's application programming interface (API) settings panel, connect Google Analytics and turn on "Crawl New URLs Discovered In Google Analytics." 3. In the same panel, connect Google Search Console and turn on "Crawl New URLs Discovered In Google Search Console." 4. Run the crawl, then start Crawl Analysis from the top menu. This step is what actually populates the orphan-page data, the crawl alone does not. 5. Open Reports > Orphan Pages for one export with a Source column showing whether each page turned up through the sitemap, Analytics, or Search Console. 6. Or check the Sitemaps, Analytics and Search Console tabs one at a time. Each has its own Orphan URLs filter. There is also a filter-only method: sort the Internal tab by crawl depth and look for blank values, pages Screaming Frog never reached by following links at all. A page with no internal links can still get crawled if it sits in the XML sitemap, but it collects none of the relevance signal internal links carry. If it also falls out of the sitemap, Google has no path to it at all. Screaming Frog's free tier crawls up to 500 URLs and already includes both connections used above. Mettevo's own sitemap, 416 URLs on September 14, 2026, would fit inside that limit with room to spare. Paid licenses remove the cap and are listed at £199 a year on [Screaming Frog's pricing page](https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/), checked September 2026. ## How Many Internal Links Should a Page Have? There is no universal number, and Google says so directly: "There's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain. However, if you think it's too much, then it probably is." That is a judgment call, not a formula, and it is also why so many guides default to a round number like five or fifty instead of answering the harder question. The harder question is not the ceiling, it is the floor. A page with fifteen internal links and a page with three can both rank fine, depending on what those links are and where they sit. A page with zero cannot, because zero means no path in from the rest of the site at all. That is the actual finding from our own crawl: the problem on mettevo.com was never pages with too many links. It was 34 pages with none. ## Anchor Text Rules [Google's guidance on link text](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable) asks for wording that is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant" to both the page it sits on and the page it points to. The same documentation lists what that rules out directly: "click here," "read more," "website," and "article" as generic examples, next to better versions like "list of cheese types." The test Google recommends is reading the anchor text alone, outside its sentence, and checking whether it still means something specific. The [W3C's guidance on link purpose](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/link-purpose-in-context.html) makes the same point from an accessibility angle. Link text should identify its destination "without needing additional context," because a screen reader can jump from link to link without reading the surrounding sentence at all. [SEO](https://mettevo.com/seo) and accessibility land on the same rule here for different reasons. Write the anchor so it still makes sense pulled out of the page entirely, on its own, sitting in a list with every other link on the page. ## What Is the Best Internal Linking Plugin? There is no single best internal linking plugin. The right one depends on the CMS and on whether a team wants suggestions or automation. For a WordPress site like mettevo.com, three tools cover most of what teams actually need, plus one crawler that works regardless of platform. **Tool** **Platform** **Finds orphan pages** **Inserts links** **Cost signal** Link Whisper (Free) WordPress Yes, flags posts with zero internal links AI-suggested, one click in the editor Free tier on WordPress.org Yoast SEO Premium WordPress No dedicated orphan report Suggests related pages while writing Premium only, $118.80 a year Rank Math AI Link Genius WordPress Yes, identifies orphaned pages Rule-based plus AI suggestions Needs Rank Math Pro plus a Content AI subscription Screaming Frog SEO Spider Any CMS Yes, dedicated Orphan Pages report No, audit only Free to 500 URLs, then £199 a year [Link Whisper's free listing on WordPress.org](https://wordpress.org/plugins/link-whisper/) states it directly: the plugin "finds orphan pages (posts with zero internal links)" and shows "which pages have very few or no internal links pointing to them," with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered suggestions inside the WordPress editor itself. [Yoast's internal linking suggestions feature](https://yoast.com/features/internal-linking-suggestions/) is Premium-only and works differently: it suggests relevant existing pages while a writer is working on a new one, rather than auditing what already exists on the site. [Rank Math's AI Link Genius](https://rankmath.com/ai-link-genius/) goes furthest on automation. Its own page says it "analyzes your content, finds linking opportunities, fixes link issues, and automates internal linking using smart rules and AI-powered recommendations," including identifying orphaned pages directly. The non-AI parts, audits, counters, filters, bulk tools, come with Rank Math Pro. The AI-driven parts need a separate Content AI subscription on top of that. None of the three WordPress tools replace a platform-agnostic crawl. That is what Screaming Frog is for, and it is the method covered in the audit section above. ## A Repeatable Monthly Process None of this holds if it happens once. Orphan pages reappear every month a new article goes live, because a brand-new URL starts, by definition, with zero inbound links until someone points one at it. The fix is a recurring process, not a one-time cleanup. 1. Pull a fresh crawl connected to Google Analytics and Google Search Console, the same setup covered in the audit section, and export the orphan-page report. 2. Check each orphan against its own traffic and rankings, not just its presence on the list. Some orphans matter more than others. 3. Pick two or three live articles that already rank for a related topic and add one contextual link from each into the orphan. 4. Add a link back from the orphan into one or two of those same articles, so the connection runs in both directions. 5. Re-run the crawl at the start of the next month and confirm last month's orphans now show at least one inbound link. 6. Track the orphan count itself over time, on the same reporting cadence as rankings and traffic, not as a one-off audit finding. This is also where internal linking overlaps with a broader content audit: checking what to keep, merge, or retire, not just what to link. Our guide to running a SEO content audit covers that wider process in full. ## FAQ ### Do internal links need to be dofollow to help SEO? Google's own link guidance reserves nofollow for links you do not trust, paid placements, or user-submitted content, not for a site's regular internal navigation. There is no compliance reason to nofollow a link to your own page, and doing so blocks both crawlers and the relevance signal the link would otherwise carry. Keep internal links followed by default, and reserve nofollow for pages you deliberately want crawlers to skip. ### Should I link to old blog posts from new ones? Yes, and it is one of the fastest fixes for orphan pages. Every new article is a fresh opportunity to link back into older content that covers a related subtopic, which is exactly how pages that once had zero internal links start accumulating them. On our own site this is now a fixed step in the monthly process, not something done only when someone remembers. ### How long does it take to fix 34 orphan pages? There is no fixed timeline, but the work is mechanical rather than creative, which makes it quick per page. Once a team has the list of orphan pages from an audit, adding two or three contextual links from related articles typically takes ten to fifteen minutes per page. Thirty-four pages at that pace is roughly six to eight focused hours, split across the monthly process rather than done in one sitting. ### Does internal linking work the same way for e-commerce product pages? Mostly, but with one added constraint. Product pages often sit three or four clicks from the homepage inside category and subcategory levels, which is already a weak position for internal links to fix alone. The mechanics are the same: contextual links from blog and category content into the product page, descriptive anchor text, and no orphaned products. Site architecture matters more here than on a content-only blog.