Orphan Pages | What They Are & How To Find Them

An orphan page is a common but often overlooked issue that can harm your website’s search engine visibility and user experience. But what exactly are orphan pages? How do they affect your SEO performance? More importantly, how do you find and fix them? Let’s explore everything you need to know about orphaned pages and why addressing them is essential for your website’s health.

What Are Orphan Pages?

Orphaned pages are pages on a website that have no internal links pointing to them. In other words, users and search engines cannot reach these pages through your website's internal linking structure. Even if they exist and are accessible via direct URL, they aren’t accessible through your website by users or crawlers and are "isolated", making them difficult for search engines to crawl and index.

How Orphan Pages Affect SEO

Orphan pages can have several negative impacts on your SEO performance. Identifying and resolving orphaned pages is an aspect of technical search engine optimization, and a few of the issues this type of content can cause are:

• Crawlability Issues: Search engines rely heavily on internal links to crawl/discover and index content. When pages are essentially orphaned content and have no links pointing to them, search engines may not discover them, resulting in fewer pages being indexed and available for ranking.
• Decreased Page Authority: Without quality internal linking structures in place pointing to each page - and especially important pages - you’ll not pass along any link equity. Meaning, you will be telling Google that the page isn’t important and isn’t worthy of ranking.
• Poor User Experience: Orphan pages reduce a user’s ability to navigate, making it harder for users to discover valuable content, which can increase bounce rates and negatively affect engagement metrics.
• No User Metrics Are Recorded: If a page is unintentionally made an orphaned page by any variety of reasons orphaned pages exist, no one will be able to access the page without clicking directly to that page. In other words, you’ll lose out on traffic gained by the user already being on your website. Because there is no way for users to find orphan pages while on your website they will not access it unless they find it in search results, or you provide a link to them directly.

Most Common Reasons Orphaned Pages Occur

1. Site Redesign

A site redesign often involves changing the site's structure and content, leading to broken internal links. Pages that were once accessible through menus or in-page links might no longer be linked, causing them to become orphaned content.

2. Website Migration

Website migrations, especially when migrating to new platforms or restructuring or optimizing URLs, can result in orphaned pages if the new design doesn't account for previously linked content, older content is being phased out, etc. Pages might be left out during the migration process, severing their connections to the rest of the site.

3. Poor Internal Linking

Sometimes orphan pages can be created accidentally just by someone failing to plan out a solid internal linking strategy. Without a solid internal linking plan you’ll easily see pages fall through the cracks. Without quality relevant links to each page in your website you’ll notice metrics to those pages will suffer, user engagement, discoverability, etc.

4. Content Archiving

When content becomes outdated, some websites archive it without removing it completely. Often they’ll remove them from their featured positions due to them being considered “new content”, but if the website isn’t designed thoughtfully enough, this can cause the content to become orphaned. By removing the only internal links the content had it will create an orphaned page. Though this reason is not very common at all!

5. Broken or Removed Links

If not careful - during content updates - links can be changed or removed and if the page being linked to originally doesn’t have any other internal links it will be orphaned.

6. Technical Issues (CMS)

Content management systems (CMS) can sometimes create orphan pages unintentionally through URL misconfigurations or publishing errors, especially when changes are made to the site's structure or content hierarchy.

7. Intentional Orphan Pages

Some websites create orphan pages intentionally for specific purposes, like landing pages for ads or exclusive content that they don’t want indexed or navigable through regular site links. While not inherently bad, these should be managed carefully to ensure they don’t negatively impact SEO.

How Do You Know When You Should Fix Orphan Pages?

Not every orphan page needs to be fixed, but it’s crucial to fix those that are intended to drive traffic or provide important content. Typically if an orphan page wasn’t completely intentionally made an orphan page - it probably needs to be fixed. If you didn’t mean for a page to become orphaned then chances are it is hurting your SEO, user-engagement, crawl budget, etc.

How To Find Orphan Pages

There are several methods to identify orphan pages:

1. Use Website Crawlers: Tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs can crawl your site and detect pages without inbound links. They’ll then compile a list of orphaned pages and provide you with it so you know which pages to build links to.
2. Check Google Search Console: Google Search Console can help identify pages that are indexed but not linked from other internal pages. Though for beginners this tool is a bit harder to use than the tools mentioned in the previous step..

How To Fix Orphan Pages

Once you’ve identified orphan pages, fixing them is relatively straightforward:

1. Remove The Page

If the content is outdated, irrelevant, or redundant, consider removing the page entirely to streamline your site and prevent wasting crawl budget.

2. Build Relevant Internal Links

Build relevant high-authority links from your website to the page. You only need one internal link to resolve the page’s orphan status, but if the page is important having 5+ links would be a good place to start. Ideally you’ll have as many highly relevant internal links as possible to more important pages though.

3. Set Up Redirects To Pass Link Equity

If the orphan page has valuable backlinks or previous traffic, setting up 301 redirects to other relevant content can help retain its SEO value while directing users to more useful pages. You wouldn’t resolve the orphan status, but you’d take advantage of the previously established backlinks, trust, and authority Google is already aware of with the page.

4. Update Your Sitemap

Ensure the orphan pages are included in your XML sitemap, so search engines know they are part of the site and should be crawled. However, without adding internal links to the orphaned page, you’ll not resolve its status as an “orphan”.

How These Fixes Will Improve Your Website

Fixing orphan pages comes with several benefits:

1. Improve Crawlers’ Coverage Of Your Website

By adding orphan pages back into your internal structure, you ensure that search engines can properly crawl all your important content, improving the indexation rate.

2. Utilized Crawl Budget

By ensuring you have no orphaned pages you’ll help to ensure your crawl budget is spent efficiently. Crawlers spend a portion of your crawl budget on pages that are harder to access, so if you make sure no pages are hard to access you’ll save that portion of your budget.

3. Consistent Crawling

Crawlers might miss orphaned content when crawling your website. Sometimes they’ll crawl it, and other times they won’t. By resolving any orphaned pages you’ll ensure that your content will get crawled each time your website is being crawled - meaning your updates will reflect in search results sooner and more often.

4. Improve Ranking Potential Of The Page

Internal linking helps distribute link equity across pages, boosting their chances of ranking higher in search results. One part of SEO is to ensure each page has quality internal links. Without building these types of links you’ll decrease UI/UX, indexation, and search engine ranking potential. We have a guide showing you the importance of building strong links in your content - check it out!