What an orphan is, and how recto ranks them.

Not every orphan is worth the same fix. recto defines orphans precisely and orders them by what they cost you, so your first link is your highest-leverage one.

What counts as an orphan

An orphan is a page that is published and indexable but has no internal links from other pages on your site pointing to it. Readers following your internal links never reach it, and it’s starved of the link equity that helps pages rank. It may still be in Google’s index — it’s just isolated inside your own site.

The workbench showing a list of orphan pages with their impression and ranking data. — Each orphan, with the signal recto uses to rank it. The most valuable fix sits at the top.

How recto ranks them

If Search Console is connected, recto ranks orphans by the impressions they’re already earning — a page Google shows often but that no internal link supports is the most valuable to fix. Without Search Console, recto falls back to link structure: how deep the page sits and how isolated it is.

Why it matters

Internal links do two jobs: they help readers discover related pages, and they pass ranking signal between pages. An orphan gets neither. Linking it from a relevant, already-ranking post is one of the cheapest SEO wins available — no new content, just a connection you should have had.

recto only ever links orphans from relevant posts, using a phrase you already wrote. It will not stuff links or invent anchor text — see Insert a link.

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