Internal linking: how to find orphan pages and fix click depth

Short answer: Internal linking means your own pages link to each other, and Google says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. To check it, find the pages nobody links to (orphan pages), count how many clicks your important pages are from the home page (click depth) and fix broken or redirected links. Google names no ideal depth and no ideal number of links, and nobody can promise what a change does to your rankings.

What does internal linking do for Google?

Google's SEO Starter Guide puts it plainly: "Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled." Often those are other websites, but your own pages are the part you control. The guide adds that the vast majority of the new pages Google finds each day are found through links, and Google's page on link best practices says Google uses links as a signal for the relevance of pages and to find new pages to crawl.

That gives internal linking two jobs: it leads visitors and Google from pages they know to pages they do not know yet, and the words of each link tell both what the target is about. A sitemap does not replace it. Google's sitemap overview says a sitemap helps search engines discover URLs but does not guarantee that they are crawled and indexed (more in our article on the XML sitemap).

The Starter Guide also keeps this in proportion. It tells you not to drop everything and reorganize your site, because search engines will likely understand your pages as they are. Fix the gaps below; you do not need a new structure.

What is an orphan page?

An orphan page is a page that no other page of your site links to. Visitors cannot reach it by browsing, and Google can only find it by other routes: a sitemap, a link from another website or an address it already knew. The Google pages we read for this article use neither "orphan page" nor "click depth"; both words come from SEO tools. What Google does say, on its link best practices page: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site." The sitemap overview puts it the same way: every page you consider important can be reached through some form of navigation, be it your menu or links placed on pages. It adds that on large sites this is harder to make sure of.

Not every orphan is a mistake. A thank-you page after a form, or a page you keep out of search on purpose, may stay unlinked. The mistake is an orphan you want people to find: an old article, a landing page that never made it into the menu, a page that lost its links in a relaunch.

To find them, compare two lists. The first holds every page that exists, from your sitemap or your CMS. The second holds every page a crawler reaches by following links from the home page. A page in the first list but not in the second is an orphan. One limit: a page that is in no sitemap and has no link shows up in no crawl. Only your CMS or your server knows it.

What is click depth?

Click depth is the number of clicks a visitor needs from the home page to reach a page, counted along the shortest path. The home page is depth 0, a page linked from it is depth 1, and so on. The Google pages we read name no number of clicks that is too many.

What Google says about structure is modest: organizing a site logically can help search engines and users understand how pages relate. For sites with more than a few thousand URLs, the Starter Guide says organization may affect how Google crawls and indexes, because folders that group similar topics help Google learn how often their URLs change. That is about folders, not clicks.

SEOgrinder marks pages from depth 4 on. That threshold is our own rule, not Google's, and we do not put a number on what shallower pages gain in search. The reason to keep important pages close is plainer: fewer clicks for visitors.

Two traps:

• Click depth is not URL depth. /shop/shoes/red/ can be one click from the home page if the menu links to it, and /about can be five clicks away if only a long chain of pages leads there.
• The count depends on which links you include. SEOgrinder follows every internal link in the HTML, menu and footer too. A page linked from the footer counts as depth 1, even if few visitors look there. Read the depth as a minimum, not as the way most people take.

How to fix orphan pages and deep pages

1. Decide what the page is for. If it has no purpose, remove it: answer 404 or 410, or redirect it with a 301 to its replacement (301 vs 302; to take it out of Google see removing a page from Google). If it should stay online but out of search, leaving it unlinked is a valid choice.
2. Link it from a page on the same topic, in a sentence a reader would follow: an article, a category page or a hub. Google says good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both pages.
3. Shorten paths with hubs. Link important pages from the menu or from a topic page that collects them, and add breadcrumbs and links between related pages. Our blog works this way: each language has one overview that links to every article.
4. Do not stuff the menu. Google writes: "There's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain." If you think it is too much, it adds, it probably is.
5. Keep the sitemap, but do not rely on it. A sitemap entry is a hint to Google, not a link on your site.
6. Scan again and wait. The Starter Guide says you likely want to wait a few weeks to judge a change.

Write links Google can follow

Google says it can generally only crawl a link that is an <a> element with an href attribute, and that most links in other formats are not parsed. Links inserted with JavaScript work if they use that markup.

<a href="/blog/guide">internal linking guide</a>      <!-- works -->
<a href="/blog/guide" onclick="track()">guide</a>      <!-- works: href is present -->
<span href="/blog/guide">guide</span>                  <!-- not recommended -->
<a onclick="goTo('/blog/guide')">guide</a>             <!-- not recommended: no href -->

The visible text matters as much. Google asks for descriptive text and names "click here" and "read more" as bad examples; for an image link it uses the alt text as anchor text. SEOgrinder reports both problems as "Links without link text" and "Generic link text".

Broken and redirected internal links

A link to a page that answers with an error is a dead end for visitors: repair or remove it, or point it at the new address if the target moved. A link whose target redirects still works, but your own navigation can point straight at the final address.

What SEOgrinder checks for internal linking

Disclosure: SEOgrinder is our own free tool, and we build it. You enter the address of a public website and get a report without an account. For links it reports:

• Area "Page on Google", card "Link check": the internal links of the scanned page (up to 60) and up to 30 images, split into working, broken and "Via redirect". Tasks: "N internal links are broken", "N internal links go through a detour", "Links without link text", "Generic link text". It checks one page, not the whole site.
• Area "Website", card "Website crawl": it follows links from the start page and shows "Max. click depth" and, under "Structure", "From depth 4" and "Orphan pages". Tasks: "N pages have no internal link" and "N pages need four or more clicks". On seogrinder.com the crawl is capped at 500 fetches (redirects and retries count); when the cap is reached, the report says so and its findings apply only to the part checked.
• With Search Console data: the task "In-demand pages barely linked in content" lists pages Google already shows that few other pages link to in their text.

An "orphan" here is an address in the sitemap that none of the crawled pages links to; pages with noindex are left out. Without a sitemap there is nothing to compare. If the links are built only in the browser, or the crawl ended early, an unlinked page cannot be ruled out. In these cases the tile says "not checkable" and gives the reason. Listed orphans are real; "none" is proven only once every sitemap address has been visited. SEOgrinder does not see a page that is in neither the sitemap nor any link, and it does not measure rankings.

We ran this on our own blog

On 5 November 2026 we compared the blog overview of each language with the sitemap. The footer of our start page links to the blog overview, and the English overview links to the overviews of all twelve languages. For English, two commands give the numbers:

curl -sS https://seogrinder.com/en/blog | grep -o 'href="/en/blog/[^"]*"' | sort -u | wc -l
curl -sS https://seogrinder.com/sitemap.xml | grep -o '<loc>https://seogrinder.com/en/blog/[^<]*' | wc -l

Both printed 34. We repeated the comparison with the other eleven language codes: the sitemap lists 408 article addresses, and every one is linked from the overview of its language. The deepest articles are three clicks from the start page (start page, English overview, overview of the language, article). This is a check of links, not of rankings, and it covers only what our sitemap lists that day.

Common mistakes

• Letting the sitemap stand in for links. It is a hint, not a route visitors can use.
• "Click here" and "read more". Name the destination.
• Click handlers instead of links. Use <a href>; Google cannot reliably follow a script event that acts as a link.
• Mixing up URL depth and click depth. Count clicks, not slashes.
• Linking to old addresses. A link through a redirect works, but it is a detour you can remove.
• Judging the result after a few days. Google says to wait a few weeks.

FAQ

How many internal links should a page have?

Google names no number. It says there is no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain, and that if you think it is too much, it probably is.

Do orphan pages or deep pages hurt my rankings?

The Google pages we read do not say so. They say every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page, and that a sitemap does not guarantee crawling or indexing. What a change does to a position, nobody can promise. Fewer clicks do help visitors reach a page, so look at the deepest pages first.

Your next step

Scan your site with SEOgrinder, open the "Website" area and look at "Orphan pages" and "From depth 4". Pick the first page you care about and add one link to it from a related page, with text that names the topic. Then press Check again. If a page you linked still does not show up on Google, read why a website is not showing on Google.