How a real-estate site reconnected 240 orphaned listings
An anonymised real-estate website (~600 pages crawled)
45
Before
71
After
Illustrative teardown built from representative audit patterns, not a named client. See our real before/after case study →
Real-estate sites generate huge numbers of listing and location pages, and most of them end up reachable only through search or deep pagination. This site had hundreds of listings that internal links never pointed to. Here's what the audit found and what changed.
What the audit found
240
Orphaned listings
Listing pages reachable only via on-site search or deep pagination, with no contextual inbound links.
62%
Thin location linking
Most location/neighbourhood pages didn't link to related areas or to the listings within them.
2
Blog → listings links
Area guides and market posts almost never linked to the relevant listings or location pages.
31
Internal links to add
Prioritised links to surface listings and connect location pages.
What was changed
The kind of links added
82
Health
B+
Grade
Strong structure with a few high-impact internal links to add. Acting on the list below could unlock a meaningful lift in organic visibility.
Internal links to add
Anchor: “this downtown listing”
Placement: Paragraph 2, sentence 1
Anchor: “downtown market”
Placement: Paragraph 4, sentence 2
Anchor: “nearby Riverside”
Placement: Paragraph 6, sentence 1
14
Quick wins
12
Orphan pages
9
Anchor gaps
The problem: listings nobody linked to
On real-estate sites, listings are usually reachable through search and filters — not through editorial links. Search engines crawl those listings shallowly and rank them poorly, and listings that rotate out of featured lists get orphaned entirely. This site had 240 such pages.
The fix: connect locations, guides, and listings
The audit prioritised the links that route authority into listings: location pages linking to the listings they contain and to nearby areas, and area guides linking to the relevant location and listing pages. That turned a flat pile of pages into a connected structure.
The result
Structural health moved from 45 to 71 as orphaned listings entered the internal link graph. For a site whose inventory changes constantly, a periodic re-crawl keeps new listings from being orphaned the moment they're published.
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