Wrote a crawler that maps every internal link on a site and flags pages with fewer than two inbound internal links.
On my own site — which I would have told you had good internal linking — 31 of 142 pages had one or zero inbound internal links. Nine had literally none and were only reachable from the sitemap.
# simplified
for page in crawl(site):
for link in page.internal_links:
inbound[link].append(page.url)
orphans = [p for p in pages if len(inbound[p]) < 2]Fixed them over a weekend by adding contextual links from the three most relevant existing articles each. Six weeks later those 31 pages are up 80% in impressions as a group. Nothing else changed on them.
while(true) { automate(); }