Backlinks, competitors, algorithm updates: you influence all of it and control none of it. Internal links are the exception. Your own links, pointing at your own pages, in words you choose, with nobody’s approval required.

This breakdown covers where link authority actually goes (and how much of it drains into navigation that appears on every page), why crawl depth is a budget rather than a vanity metric, how orphan pages happen to real published content, and the three fixes you can ship this afternoon.

Sources shown on screen:
Google Search Central, link best practices: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable
Ahrefs, internal links for SEO (including John Mueller on internal linking): https://ahrefs.com/blog/internal-links-for-seo/
Moz, internal links best practices: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Chapters
0:00 The levers you do not control
0:20 Where authority actually flows
1:05 What Google’s own docs say
1:35 John Mueller: “super critical”
2:05 Crawl depth and orphan pages
2:55 Anchor text
3:15 Three moves for this week