RankNest

Recommendation Types

What each Linking Plan recommendation means: orphan rescues, structural links, missing links, reciprocals, and hygiene fixes.

The Linking Plan produces a handful of distinct recommendation types, each solving a different internal-linking problem. The tabs across the top of the plan (All, Reciprocal, One-Way, Hygiene, and Anchors) group them so you can batch similar work.

Orphan rescue

An orphan is a page with no in-content links pointing to it. Search engines discover and value pages by following links, so a page nothing links to is hard to find and easy to undervalue. These are usually the highest-impact fixes in the plan.

RankNest distinguishes two flavors on the card label:

  • True Orphan, Not Linked Anywhere. No links to the page anywhere on the site, including navigation. Crawlers may not find it at all.
  • Under-Linked, In Nav Only. The page is reachable through your menu or footer, but no page links to it from body content. It's discoverable, but it's missing the editorial links that signal what it's about.

Each orphan recommendation suggests one or more relevant source pages to link from. Orphaned pages that aren't in a topic cluster yet appear in the Orphaned Pages Need Topic Cluster Assignment panel first. Assign them so RankNest knows which pages are related.

One-way structural links (hub to page)

The One-Way tab holds directional links your site structure implies but is missing: Pillar → Money, Pillar → Service, and Money → Service. A pillar page anchors a topic cluster, so it should link down to the money and service pages it supports. That's how visitors and search engines get from your broad topic pages to the pages where someone buys. These don't need a link back.

A Missing Link flags two pages in the same topic cluster with no link in either direction. Related service pages, or location pages covering neighboring areas, should reference each other.

Missing links are shown as a pair covering both directions (A links to B, and B links to A). You can implement one direction, both, or dismiss the pair. See Implementing Recommendations.

A Reciprocal recommendation appears when one page links to another but doesn't get a link back, and the target is the kind of page that deserves one. Reciprocal links are only recommended when the page that would receive the new link is a Money, Pillar, or Supporting page. It's normal for a blog post to link to a product or service page without a link back, so Service, Product, Location, Company, and Archive targets are deliberately skipped.

The Reciprocal tab has a Level sub-filter:

  • Same cluster: the pair sits in the same topic cluster. These are the strongest candidates.
  • Same category: the pair spans clusters within the same topic category. Worth doing when the pages are genuinely related.

The Hygiene tab is housekeeping rather than growth. It covers links that already exist and should be cleaned up:

  • Duplicate outbound links. One page links to the same target multiple times (the card lists every anchor text found). Keep the best link and remove the rest. The extra links clutter the page and waste anchor-text opportunities. These cards resolve when the duplicates are removed, not added.
  • Removed page links. A link in your content points to a page that no longer exists (the card shows the HTTP error, such as 404). Delete the dead link, or repoint it to a live page. Use the Check for removed pages button on the Hygiene tab to probe your link targets on demand and flag any that have since been taken down.

Hygiene cards don't have AI placement suggestions. The fix is self-evident, so they just list the anchors involved.

Anchors: anchor text vs. ranking queries

The Anchors tab compares each page's inbound anchor text against the search queries the page actually ranks for (requires a connected Search Console property, see Google Search Console). It flags two situations:

  • Anchor opportunity: the page ranks for queries that never appear in any anchor text pointing to it. Working those words into an anchor helps confirm what the page is about.
  • Over-optimized: most inbound anchors are the exact same phrase, which reads as unnatural. Vary the wording.

Priorities and statuses

Every recommendation carries a priority, and the plan uses it to order the page list so the highest-impact pages appear first. Work top-down.

Every recommendation also has a status you can see and filter on:

  • Pending: not yet acted on. The default view.
  • Implemented: the link was verified on the live site, either by the Done button or automatically during a rescan.
  • Ignored: you dismissed it. Dismissed recommendations stay dismissed across sessions and rescans; tick Show ignored or use the Filters panel to review them.

Last updated 2026-07-25