# Internal linking

> Why internal links are the only ranking input a site fully controls, what an orphan page is, and why click depth matters more than a sitemap entry.

Source: https://netweft.com/glossary/internal-linking
Updated: 2026-09-12

**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](/features/site-audit) reports orphan pages and click depth,
because both are structural facts about a crawl rather than opinions about a
page.