In digital marketing, you may have heard of the term “orphan pages.” But what are they? Simply put, orphan pages are digital assets with no incoming links from any other page on your site. This can happen for many reasons, but usually it’s because the page doesn’t fit into the site’s nav or structure. Users can’t find them and they’ll never get traffic from search engines. While orphan pages don’t seem like a problem, they can hurt your SEO and website overall. That’s why you need to know what they are and how to prevent them. In this post we’ll cover everything.
What is an orphan page and is it bad for SEO?
An orphan page is a key concept to consider when building a site. It’s a page within the site structure that’s not linked to from anywhere else. Visitors can’t find it through navigation or internal links from other pages. It’s hard for search engines to find those pages too.
Orphan pages are important because they can be missed easily while performing SEO and UX audits, impacting website performance and preventing potential customers from reaching valuable content. Therefore, finding orphan pages and creating appropriate internal linking will ensure the most successful results both in terms of user experience and SEO performance.
How do orphan pages hurt SEO?
Having orphan pages on a site is bad news. Orphan pages (pages with no incoming links from other pages) get little traffic because anyone visiting them would have to type the URL in manually. Low-value orphan pages won’t help with SEO or reach your target audience for the site. Orphan pages also create a poor user experience because visitors will be confused or frustrated if they can’t find the page or content they’re looking for. And any changes made to an orphan page won’t be reflected elsewhere on the site because there are no other pages on the site structure linking to it.
How can I find orphan pages?
Sadly, crawling your own website with crawlers won’t help you detect orphan pages since the crawler will only find existing links from your site. To uncover orphan pages, SEO pros must go through the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) of Google for that particular website and compare them to internal crawl results.
Find orphan pages using Google Search Console
- Go to Performance > Pages in Google Search Console. Make sure Impressions is showing in the data and select the largest date range possible.
- Then export the entire list of URLs. Upload the list to a crawling tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Crawl the site.
- Go to Links > Internal Links > Unique Internal Links and look at each internal link on your site.
- Then re-crawl Screaming Frog SEO Spider without Google Search Console integrated. If a URL from the Google Search Console list is missing from the Screaming Frog SEO Spider links collection, then it’s an orphan page.
Find orphan pages using Google Analytics
- To see all the pages your users have visited, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in Google Analytics. Extend the date range as far back as possible and export the full list of URLs.
- Upload the list to Screaming Frog SEO Spider and crawl. Then go to Links > Internal Links > Unique Internal Links and see all your site’s internal links in one place.
- Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider and crawl without Google Analytics integrated. If a URL from the Screaming Frog SEO Spider list doesn’t show in your Google Analytics export, then it’s an orphan page.
Find orphan pages using Ahrefs Site Audit Tool
With Ahrefs’ Site Audit, you can discover orphan URLs for free with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account! Here’s how easy it is:
- Head to the ‘Site Audit’ page.
- Click on the “+ New Project” link and follow each successive prompt up until step 3.
- On this third window, look at the “URL Sources” tab and select “Backlinks” as a source option, along with any other defaults that are set in place already.
- Run your crawl.
Go to the Page explorer tab and sort the table you see by the number of all inlinks. Choose URLs with no incoming links. They will be orphan pages.
Find orphan pages using Rank Math
When it comes to WordPress websites, Rank Math PRO is your go-to plugin for easy detection of orphaned pages. Plus, the exact number of external links that direct others to your page is easily obtainable – making Rank Math one of the best possible SEO plugins available on WordPress today!
To discover orphaned pages, upgrade to the PRO version of Rank Math, then go to Posts/Pages in your WordPress dashboard. From there, pick Orphan Posts from the drop-down list and press Filter as illustrated below for effective searching results.
How to fix orphan pages?
Finding solutions to prevent orphan pages on a website is an important part of maintaining the navigability of a website. There are several ways to address this issue. Follow these simple steps:
- If the page is significant, determine where to place it. An easy way to enable users and search engines to find an orphan page is by building an internal link from another webpage on your website. It’s even possible to have the external site link back, though that may be a bit more complex. What really matters is establishing pathways for both users and search crawlers so they can access the relevant content.
- If the page isn’t important to your users, and you don’t want to gain any organic traffic on it, simply remove such page. Insignificant pages can be left on a website after its migration. Orphan Pages are frequently the result of a company’s desire to remove certain pages from their website, yet still retain them. For instance, perhaps there is an older blog category that should no longer be available for customers to view. By turning off this page, it becomes impossible to directly access these posts; however, they remain accessible through alternative URLs. One of the easiest solutions for companies is to delete a few categories from their website’s menu. Still, the pages are left on the website and become orphan.
- Determine if this page is ranking for any keywords, as it is an orphan page. If so, then consider integrating the content into other areas of your website. On the contrary, if not – delete it altogether.
- Decide, where should the page exist within your website’s taxonomy and how site visitors can easily find it. Place such page in the way users and search engines can access it without any troubles.
- Is this page a double page or closely to double page to another? Instead of letting it become an isolated orphan page, contemplate consolidating that content into a related page.
- Can this page be optimized and further interconnected? Would it optimize its current performance in search engines if so? If the page needs optimization, provide it.
- Has the page been linked to from external sources? Additional inlinks from other websites help this page be found by users and search engine crawlers.
- Finally, make sure that your page is included in the XML sitemap file. You should also use Google Search Console URL inspection tool to request indexing your page after you’ve added some internal links to it.
How do orphan pages appear on my website?
We have already mentioned some reasons why orphan pages can exist on your website. Let’s name some other common reasons.
- Old pages that have been entirely or incrementally removed from the internal link without being ultimately inactivated.
- With ‘Test pages’ from the shop system, it’s easy to test different versions for A/B testing. But what happens when your key person leaves and no one knows these URLs that are duplicate pages, in fact? Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered!
- Although the old URLs from a former CRM system were long gone, they have never fully been deactivated.
- Trendy/seasonal topics were perpetually featured on the landing page.
- Misapplication of the CMS, resulting in faulty webpages.
- Those categories that had been taken offline were not transferred.
- Pages were simply ‘forgotten’ during a site migration.
How to prevent my website from having orphan pages?
Think about clean, uncluttered site structure
In order to ensure that your website doesn’t contain orphan pages, it’s essential to maintain a comprehensive internal linking structure. This means that each page of the website should link out to relevant and related content. This helps to improve the organic search results from major search engines, as it presents more opportunities for web crawlers to discover more of your content.
Remove pages that you don’t ever need properly
If you’re running an e-commerce website, it’s essential to eliminate discontinued products from your catalog as soon as possible (along with any internal site links connected to them). Additionally, make sure that each of these entries has a status code set at 404 or 410; otherwise, this can result in orphaned pages. Taking the time now will save you potential headaches down the line!
If your page has an abundance of backlinks and the product it advertises is up to date, consider preserving the page to capitalize on its link investments.
Revamp the page content to illuminate why the current product is no longer accessible while also introducing its latest design features and linking directly to the new product page.
By doing this, users never have to worry about being unexpectedly redirected to an irrelevant page or a 404 error.
Perform regular audits
Additionally, performing regular audits of orphan pages (pages with no inbound links) will help you delete or update them with relevant information as needed.
Conclusion
Having pages on your site that are orphaned (no links to other parts of your site) hurts both ranking and usability. But by following design best practices and using Google Search Console and any website crawler, you can fix and prevent that. If you think you have orphan pages, do this now to sort out your site and get it performing better.