On the client site, this list was the most useful part of the internal linking audit. Once the orphan pages were listed by URL, fixing them was just a matter of adding links by hand for a week, and the count went from 47 to 9. The last 9 were thin old pages, so I merged or deleted them. That was one site, and not a controlled experiment, so treat it as an anecdote. The main takeaway is that programmatic internal linking makes the problem visible, and visibility is most of the fix.

3. Rank pages by internal authority and find link opportunities

Finding orphans is the floor. The next question is which important pages are weakly linked, and which pages should link to them.

You can write PageRank yourself (it's about 20 lines), or use a package that does it. I used @power-seo/links here because it covers graph building, equity scoring, and suggestions with no dependencies.…