If you’re from the SEO realm, you’ve probably heard about orphan pages. You might have even experienced them without even realizing it.
See, the internet is a massive interconnected web that functions by a simple rationale: To visit a website, a link has to exist pointing to the page that you want to view.
Now, consider Google as part of that. You perform a search, using a keyword, and find a landing page related to your search. This will lead you to the page you are looking for. Or, say you have clicked on a direct link from an external source, such as a blog or a news article. Linking is what allows you to reach your desired page.
So, what happens when there’s a page to which you want to visit, but there’s no link to get you there? These are known as orphan pages.
Now, before we venture any further, let’s try to understand what orphan pages are so you know what to look for. Because there’s a good chance your website probably has a few.
Orphan pages are web pages that search engines may have difficulty discovering because they are not linked to any other pages on the same website, effectively making them hard to find because there are no paths leading to them.
Now, since these pages are hard-to-find, these URLs tend to get ignored and fall through the cracks. Why? Crawlers can actually go through the website itself and look for the links to other pages; however, the crawl depth and budget affects how many pages it will crawl that way. Hence, orphaned URLs are usually left undetected. So, if there’s high-quality, precious content, specifically targeted for your audience on these pages, visitors won’t be able to see it. And all that hard work you put in, will go down the drain, negatively affecting your website’s SEO.
Orphan pages negatively impact the SEO in two ways:
Orphan pages can occur for various reasons. Some of the most common causes due to which orphan pages arise are not having processes for site migrations, unoptimized site architecture, navigation changes, outdated pages / out-of-stock products, or pages deliberately left unlinked for specific purposes like testing or developing pages.
There are other times where orphan pages may also be intentional, as with PPC landing pages that are used for certain campaigns.
How many times have many of us clicked on a link, only to find it leads to a “page not found” message? It’s not a rarity, it’s quite common, and can be the source of an orphan page. Search engines like Google or Bing eventually resolve these errors. So, you don’t need to do anything in this case as it won’t harm your ranking ability.
However, there are cases where you’ll eventually need to take action, and that’s where you’ll need tools to help you find orphan pages on your site.
It doesn’t matter which tool you use to detect the orphan pages. But what is essential is to have an accurate XML sitemap. Why? Because the tool being used needs to be informed about the URLs on the website, and if it discovers a URL that is unregistered or unrecognized in the sitemap, it will label it as an orphan page.
Simply put, the crawl will only recognize the pages from the sitemap.
After you’ve identified, orphan pages should be fixed. In an ideal world, you must prioritize fixing all the orphans on your site before attracting new visitors and building your organic traffic. One way to do it is to adopt them by adding internal links to these URLs. Make sure they are also submitted in your sitemap. This method works if you still find the orphan page’s content useful.
Here are a few tips on how to fix orphan pages:
Orphan pages that are valuable for your site visitors should include an internal link from a related page to the orphan page. This will make them easier for users and search engines to find, enable Google to re-crawl the page and discover the new internal link, helping it to crawl and index the orphan page.
If there are any web pages that you purposely did not link internally, you can add a no-index tag to them. This curbs them from being visible in search engine results. To do this, insert the line of code: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”/> on the page. Otherwise, you can block these pages in your robots.txt file, which would signal to Google and other crawlers to not index those pages.
Orphan pages with identical or nearly identical content to another page should be consolidated. In that case, the best course of action is to consolidate the content and redirect the orphan URL to the other page.
If you find orphan pages that offer no value for visitors and serve no other purpose (e.g., paid traffic campaign), it’s best to delete them entirely from your website and then implement a 301 redirect from the URL to another relevant page on your site.
For example, an unused CMS theme page can be removed. This will result in a 404 page and naturally drop out of search results over time.
Orphaned pages are a huge problem from an SEO perspective. However, they’re not difficult to identify and fix and are even easier to prevent. With the proper knowledge and tools, you can ensure your website’s internal linking structure is sound and that your pages aren’t falling through the cracks. Prioritize having a regular process to catch any unwanted orphan pages and immediately address them.
Team DG consists of passionate writers, SEOs, designers, paid marketing specialists, and creative strategists. As a team, we work together to lift businesses and brands from ground-up and push them to new heights. Every new challenge helps us to expand our horizon of knowledge and gain valuable experiences. Team DG leverages those experiences to create result-driven marketing campaigns for brands and help them reach their ambitious goals.
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