The fix, in one snippet
<p>Our <a href="/guides/arch-support">guide to arch support</a>
explains why the insole matters more than the upper.</p>Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
We build the internal link graph from the crawl and run ten iterations of PageRank over it with the standard 0.85 damping factor, then normalise the result so the strongest page on the site scores 100. Alongside that we count how many distinct crawled pages link to each URL.
A page is reported when both signals are weak: a link score under 15 and one inbound link or none. Either alone is common and often fine; together they describe a page the site does not really support.
Why it matters
Internal links are the part of a site's authority you control completely. External links are earned; internal links are a decision about which of your pages matter, and search engines read them that way.
The practical effect is that two pages of equal quality rank differently because one sits in the navigation and the other is reachable only from a paginated archive. The second is crawled less often, reindexed more slowly after edits, and competes from behind.
It is also the cheapest thing on this list to fix. Adding one contextual link from a page that already ranks costs a sentence and moves real authority, where earning an external link costs weeks.
How to fix it
Start with the pages in the evidence that you actually care about, and link to them from somewhere relevant that already has support:
<!-- in the guide that already ranks, not in the footer -->
<p>Our <a href="/guides/arch-support">guide to arch support</a> explains
why the insole matters more than the upper.</p>Prefer contextual links inside the body over another row in the footer: a footer link appears on every page and is discounted accordingly, while a link inside relevant prose is the signal you want. Link from the strong pages to the weak ones rather than the reverse, and use anchor text that describes the destination.
Where a page genuinely does not deserve support, that is an answer too: merge it, or take it out of the index.
Where this fits
Pages with little internal link support is check 4 of 7 that the seo & site health audit runs under links and site structure, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Orphan pages (medium), where a page nothing links to is reachable only by knowing its address. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Pages with little internal link support closes one route in. Immediately below it: Generic or empty anchor text, where "Click here" describes the action, not the destination; Internal anchor text repetition, where every link to a page using the same words tells search engines one thing about it, repeatedly; Pages buried deep in the structure, where pages several clicks from the entry point are crawled less often and carry less internal authority.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error, and Duplicate body content, where two pages with identical body text are one page at two addresses, and search engines will pick one of them for you. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Pages with little internal link support (medium severity)
Scanner check id: seo-internal-link-equityThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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