A crawler report can give a very definite name to a much less definite finding.
In September 2026 I investigated an archive where a report described a large group of older pages as orphaned. Looking at the site’s actual structure showed a more useful distinction: some pages were deep in archives, while other content really did lack an obvious route in.
Unreached is not automatically unreachable
A crawler has a starting point, a set of rules and limits on how far it goes. A URL absent from that crawl tells me it was not reached under those conditions. I still need to establish whether the site links to it.
A page several levels down a paginated archive may be technically linked but inconvenient to reach. That is a real problem worth investigating. It calls for a different response from a page with no useful internal links at all.
Count the routes the site really uses
My first reporting pass looked too narrowly at taxonomy archives. I expanded it to account for other routes, including menus, block-based navigation, parent pages and direct content links. Without that, the replacement report risked repeating the same confident mistake in a different form.
This is the part I find most useful in a technical audit: challenging the definition behind the number. A custom content type may be publicly viewable even if a simplistic query flag suggests otherwise. A block theme may store navigation differently from a traditional menu.
Then decide what would help the reader
- For disconnected content, add relevant routes from pages people already use.
- For deeply buried material, consider a useful topic hub or better archive navigation.
- For overlapping articles, read them before deciding whether they should be combined.
- For obsolete content, choose an explicit retention or retirement plan.
I do not solve this by scattering unrelated links around the site. The link should help someone understand why the destination is worth opening. Google’s link guidance covers crawlable links and descriptive anchor text; the editorial judgement still belongs to the person organising the content.
Keep the evidence visible
A useful report should explain why a page is in the list and what routes were checked. I would rather have a smaller, qualified set of findings that leads to good decisions than an alarming total whose meaning falls apart when I open the first example.
The same principle applies to deciding what to do with old content: investigate the role of the page before reaching for a bulk action.