Pages have no inbound internal links

Why it matters

A page that no other page on the site links to is hard to discover. Search engines find it via the sitemap but assign it low PageRank because nothing on the site says "this matters." AI engines often skip orphan pages entirely because they read site hierarchy from the internal link graph and an orphan has no graph position. Most orphans are accidental: pages that got renamed without updating their inbound links, or one-off marketing landing pages that nobody linked to from the main nav.

The fix

Find orphans:

```sh
# every URL from the sitemap
curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -oE "<loc>[^<]+</loc>" | sed "s/<[^>]*>//g" > sitemap-urls.txt

# crawl, collect every internal href
wget -r -l 5 --spider https://example.com 2>&1 | grep -oE 'https://example.com/[^ ]*' | sort -u > linked-urls.txt

# orphans = sitemap minus linked
comm -23 <(sort sitemap-urls.txt) linked-urls.txt
```

Fix three ways depending on what the page is:

- **Genuinely useful but unlinked**: link to it from a relevant parent (a blog index, a docs sidebar, a category page). One inbound link is enough.
- **Outdated / replaced**: 301-redirect to the current equivalent. Remove from sitemap.
- **Test pages or stubs that shipped by mistake**: delete, 410, remove from sitemap.

Going forward: ensure your CMS or build pipeline auto-links new content from at least one index page (blog list, documentation TOC, sitemap UI). Orphans are rare on systems that do this; common on systems that don't.

References

• Google Search Central: internal linking