An orphan page is a webpage not linked to any other page on the same website, making it inaccessible without the direct URL.
Pages with no internal inks are difficult for both users and search engine crawlers to find, resulting in them rarely being indexed and potentially harming SEO performance.
But that’s not all…
Because orphan pages don’t have internal links, it’s difficult for search engines like Google to find them.
That means Google will find it hard to crawl the page and won’t add it to the search index.
That’s not good for SEO.
🔥 Increase your search traffic in just 28 days. Click Here Now.
What Will I Learn?
Orphan pages affect SEO because they are almost invisible to search engines and users. Because they can’t be found, they won’t be crawled and indexed by Google.
This will ultimately lead to low (or no) visibility in the search results.
Here’s how orphan pages affect SEO:
Orphan pages can have a significant effect on your SEO. It’s important to identify and fix them quickly.
The best way to find orphan pages is by using an SEO tool like Screaming Frog to crawl your sitemap.
It’s important that you configure the SEO spider to crawl ONLY your sitemap. This ensures that the crawl analysis will still pick up any orphaned pages.
You could also look at the inlinks column for quick reference:
Once you have identified orphaned pages on your website, you can fix them.
There are 4 steps you can take to fix orphan pages:
Which step to take depends on the type of content and the topic of the page.
The easiest way to fix orphan pages is by adding internal links from relevant content on your site.
This will help search engines find and index them. Strategically placing internal links also boosts the page’s SEO value.
That’s a win-win!
Check out our complete guide to internal link building tutorial to learn more.
If you want to keep the page on the site but it doesn’t contribute to your site’s SEO value – You can simply add a noindex tag.
This will mean the page is accessible to those who have the link but it’s removed from the search results pages.
For example, let’s say you create a temporary landing page and only want to send paid traffic from Facebook ads to that page. You can choose to noindex the page and stop it from showing up in Google’s search results.
That way it’s still accessible to people from your Facebook ad campaign but won’t negatively affect your SEO.
Does the page have similar content to another page on your site?
Merge them both using a 301 redirect. This eliminates the issue with the orphan page and transfers any link equity across to the new URL.
Found an orphan page that offers no value?
Simply delete it!
Deleting unnecessary pages cleans up your site, making it easier for search engines to navigate. You may need to redirect it to prevent a 404 error.
Important: Consider if the page content can be repurposed or if it has historical backlinks worth redirecting before deleting.
📈 Increase your traffic in just 28 days. Click Here Now.
Join My Facebook Group
