Every site accumulates broken and orphaned internal links over time — old campaign pages get deleted, URLs get restructured, and nobody updates the links pointing to them. The result is link equity that dead-ends instead of flowing to the pages you actually want to rank.
A five-step recovery audit
- Crawl the full site and flag internal links returning 404s or redirect chains.
- Identify orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them at all.
- Map your highest-authority pages and check how many clicks away your priority pages sit.
- Rebuild links from relevant, high-authority pages toward key money pages.
- Re-crawl monthly — decay is ongoing, not a one-time fix.