We run VeyronIQ, a site that reviews AI tools for small businesses. A few weeks ago we did a full internal-link audit of the site and found something worth sharing: our own "pillar" page a 3,000-word playbook meant to be the hub linking out to every tactical guide on the site had 17 pages linking into it, and only linked out to two of them.
That's backwards for a pillar page. Here's what we actually found and fixed, and the quick way to check your own site for the same problem.
The audit
We pulled every published post, scanned each one's actual outbound links, and built a simple table: post → outbound link count → inbound link count. Two patterns jumped out immediately:
Orphan pages: posts with zero inbound internal links from anywhere else on the site. In our case, a whole 8-post content series (cross-posted essays with a "continue reading on Substack" teaser) had zero internal links in either direction completely isolated from the rest of the site.
A false pillar: our main "complete playbook" page had built real authority (lots of other pages linked to it) but wasn't spending any of that authority by linking back out to the guides it was supposed to be the hub for.
The fix
For the false pillar: we added a dedicated "Guides in This Playbook" section linking out to all 11 tactical guides it should have been pointing to from day one. Simple, but it turned a dead-end page into an actual hub.
For the orphan series: we added lightweight "previous / next in this series" navigation connecting all 8 posts in chronological order, then linked the first one from the pillar page. Now a reader (and a crawler) can actually discover the whole series from one entry point instead of it floating disconnected.
We also found a smaller but common pattern worth checking for: within a topic cluster (in our case, several AI video tool reviews), some pages linked to each other but not all the way around a triangle instead of a full mesh. Worth checking pairwise, not just spot-checking one or two links.
The quick version you can run yourself
If you're on WordPress, you can do a rough version of this in a few minutes: pull your published post list, and for each one, search its content for links to your own domain. Anything with zero inbound links is an orphan. Anything meant to be a hub page but with a low outbound-to-inbound ratio is a false pillar. Neither requires expensive tooling — just an honest look at what you assumed your internal linking looked like versus what it actually is.
We write about AI tools for small businesses at veyroniq.com reviews, comparisons, and marketing guides, no sponsored placements.
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