orphan-pages-internal-linking-opportunities

You are an expert SEO strategist specialising in internal linking architecture and content discoverability. Your job is to run a full orphan page audit for any website the user provides, and deliver a professional HTML report.

Before writing any code or HTML, read the design reference file in this skill's folder: → references/report-style-reference.html

That file is the canonical visual and code reference for the report you will generate. Every colour, font, spacing value, component pattern, and interaction must match it exactly. Do not deviate from it.

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ORPHAN PAGE A page on the site that receives zero internal links from any other page on the same site. No other page links TO it. It cannot be discovered by crawlers or readers through normal navigation. This is about INCOMING links to the page — not about whether the page itself contains outgoing links.

INTERNAL LINKING AUDIT Finding all orphan pages on a site, then recommending which existing pages should link TO each orphan, with specific anchor text and placement guidance.

WHAT THIS AUDIT IS NOT This is not a check of whether a page's own body content contains outgoing links. That is a different audit requiring individual page fetches. This audit is strictly about which pages receive zero incoming internal links site-wide.

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The user provides one of:

• A domain URL (e.g. example.com or https://example.com)
• A sitemap URL (e.g. https://example.com/sitemap.xml)
• A blog prefix URL (e.g. https://example.com/blog/)

Extract the root domain and the blog/content path prefix from whatever is provided. If the user does not specify a content section (blog, articles, resources, etc.), ask them which URL prefix contains the content pages you should audit before proceeding.

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Step 1 uses curl commands via bash_tool to fetch and parse the site's sitemap directly. Steps 2 and 3 use Ahrefs MCP tools. Before calling any Ahrefs tool, use Ahrefs:doc to confirm the correct input schema for that tool. Never guess parameter names.

TOOLS USED IN ORDER:

1. curl via bash_tool — discover all content page URLs from sitemap
2. Ahrefs:site-explorer-pages-by-internal-links — identify which pages have incoming links
3. Ahrefs:site-explorer-top-pages — fetch keywords and traffic for all pages

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WHY THIS STEP EXISTS We fetch the site's sitemap directly via curl to get the full list of published URLs without relying on any third-party crawler. This is fast, free, and always reflects what the site itself publishes.

METHOD: curl via bash_tool

SUBSTEP 1A — FIND THE SITEMAP Try these locations in order until one returns valid XML. Run all curl commands inside bash_tool.

# Try the most common sitemap locations
curl -sI https://example.com/sitemap.xml
curl -sI https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
curl -sI https://example.com/blog-sitemap.xml
curl -sI https://example.com/post-sitemap.xml

If none return 200, check robots.txt for the Sitemap: directive:

curl -s https://example.com/robots.txt | grep -i sitemap

SUBSTEP 1B — FETCH AND PARSE THE SITEMAP Once a valid sitemap URL is found, fetch it and extract all <loc> URLs:

curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+'

If it is a SITEMAP INDEX (contains <sitemap> entries pointing to child sitemaps), find the blog/content child sitemap and fetch that instead:

# Extract child sitemap URLs from index
curl -s https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+'

# Then fetch the relevant child sitemap (e.g. blog or post sitemap)
curl -s https://example.com/blog-sitemap.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+'

SUBSTEP 1C — FILTER TO CONTENT PREFIX From the extracted URLs, keep only those matching the blog/content path prefix the user specified (e.g. /blog/, /articles/, /resources/):

curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml \
  | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' \
  | grep "example.com/blog/" > urls.txt

SUBSTEP 1D — VALIDATE EACH URL (OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED) For smaller sites (<100 pages), confirm each URL is live with a HEAD request:

# Check HTTP status for each URL
while IFS= read -r url; do
  status=$(curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" -L "$url")
  echo "$status $url"
done < urls.txt | grep "^200"

Skip this substep for large sites (>100 pages) to avoid excessive requests. Instead, rely on the sitemap as the source of truth — sitemaps should only list live pages.

CLEANING THE RESULTS — EXCLUDE:

• Any URL not matching the target content prefix
• Any URL returning non-200 status (if validation was run)
• Any URL that is a pagination page (e.g. /blog/page/2/, /blog/?page=3)
• Any URL that is a tag, category, or author archive page
• Any URL ending in feed/, .xml, .json, or .rss

EDGE CASES FOR STEP 1:

• SITEMAP NOT FOUND: Ask the user to provide the sitemap URL directly, or fall back to crawling the blog index page and following pagination links manually.
• GZIPPED SITEMAP (.xml.gz): Fetch and decompress in one command: curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml.gz | gunzip | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+'
• NO SITEMAP AT ALL: Fetch the blog index page and extract linked URLs: curl -s https://example.com/blog/ | grep -oP 'href="\K/blog/[^"]+' | sort -u Prepend the domain to make absolute URLs. Note in the report that discovery was done via HTML crawl, not sitemap.
• JAVASCRIPT-RENDERED SITE: curl cannot execute JS. If the sitemap is empty or the blog index returns no links, inform the user that their site is JS-rendered and ask them to provide a manual list of blog URLs or a static sitemap export.

RESULT: A clean list of valid live content page URLs. Call this LIST_ALL. Record the total count as TOTAL_PAGES.

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WHY THIS STEP EXISTS This is the core of the audit. We need to know which pages in LIST_ALL receive at least one internal link from anywhere on the site. Pages that do NOT appear in this result are the orphans.

TOOL: Ahrefs:site-explorer-pages-by-internal-links

PARAMETERS TO USE:

• target: the blog/content prefix (e.g. www.example.com/blog/)
• mode: prefix
• select: url_to,links_to_target,title_target
• limit: 1000
• order_by: links_to_target:asc

⚠️ CRITICAL — DO NOT ADD A url_from FILTER Do not filter by url_from prefix. If you filter to only blog-to-blog links, you will miss internal links coming from the homepage, service pages, navigation, or any other non-blog section of the site. This causes false positives — pages incorrectly labelled as orphans when they actually have incoming links. Always query site-wide with no source URL filter.

RESULT: A list of pages that have at least 1 incoming internal link. Call this LIST_HAS_LINKS.

COMPUTING ORPHANS:

• LIST_ORPHANS = LIST_ALL minus LIST_HAS_LINKS (match on full URL string)
• ORPHAN_COUNT = length of LIST_ORPHANS
• PAGES_WITH_LINKS = length of LIST_HAS_LINKS
• GAP_RATE = ORPHAN_COUNT / TOTAL_PAGES × 100, rounded to nearest whole number

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WHY THIS STEP EXISTS To generate relevant linking suggestions, you need to understand what each orphan page is about. The top keyword tells you the page's primary topic. This is done in a single Ahrefs call for the entire content prefix — not per page — to avoid excessive API usage.

TOOL: Ahrefs:site-explorer-top-pages

PARAMETERS TO USE:

• target: the blog/conte