Internal linking
Also called internal links, site architecture
The links a site makes between its own pages. They determine what a crawler can find, how much of a site's own authority reaches each page, and — through anchor text — what each page is understood to be about.
Internal linking is the only significant input to how a site ranks that the site’s owner controls completely. Nobody has to agree to it, nobody has to be emailed, and it costs nothing but attention.
An orphan page is a page no other page links to. It may be in the sitemap and it may be reachable by typing its URL, but a crawler arriving from a link has no route to it and a person browsing the site has no route to it either. Sitemaps are a weak substitute: they announce a URL, they do not vouch for it.
Click depth is a real constraint. A page four or five clicks from the home page receives very little of whatever authority the home page has, and is crawled correspondingly less often. On a large catalogue this is usually the thing quietly deciding which half of the site ranks.
Anchor text is where this compounds. Descriptive internal anchors do two jobs at once — they tell a crawler what the destination is about and they tell a reader whether to click. “Read more” does neither.
The site audit reports orphan pages and click depth, because both are structural facts about a crawl rather than opinions about a page.
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