The five gates we write about are directives on a single page: its status code, robots rules, canonical. This is a different problem. A page can pass every one of those checks and still be hard for Google to reach, because nothing links to it, or only one weak thing does.

How Google finds a page

Two ways: your sitemap, and links. Links carry more weight. A URL that sits in the sitemap but appears nowhere in your own link graph is telling Google “here is a page” while every other signal on the site says “we do not reference this.” Google notices the gap.

The three shapes that cause trouble

Orphan. No internal links point at it. This happens to old campaign pages, PDF landing pages, filtered or sorted views, and pages that lost their link in a redesign. We flag a page as an orphan once we have crawled enough of the site to be confident the links really are not there.

Shallow. Exactly one internal link in, and it is not the homepage. One thin thread. If that single linking page drops the link or falls out of the crawl, the page becomes an orphan.

Nofollow-only inbound. Every internal link pointing at the page carries rel="nofollow". Google mostly reads that as “do not pass anything through here,” so the page has inbound links that do not count as discovery or endorsement.

Click depth

We measure how many clicks each page is from the homepage, following normal links. Pages one or two clicks deep get crawled often. Pages six or seven deep get crawled rarely. Across a lot of sites, depth lines up with what ends up indexed more reliably than most on-page factors do.

The links you have that point nowhere

The other side of the same picture. Internal links that resolve to a 404 or bounce through a redirect waste crawl attention and read as neglect. We list the dead targets per page so you can fix the source link or drop it.

Fixing it

Link to orphans from pages that already get crawled. A link from a page two clicks deep is worth more than one from a page eight clicks deep.
Pull important pages up. Add them to the main navigation, a hub page, or a section index so they are not buried.
Use followed links for internal navigation. Keep nofollow for genuinely untrusted outbound links, not for your own pages.
Fix or remove internal links that 404.

Where to start

Check one page at a time with the free tool to rule out a per-page blocker. To see the whole link graph at once, the click depth of every URL, and which pages are orphaned or shallow, connect the site.