Orphaned Pages: How to Harm Your SEO and How to Find Them
A page on your website that doesn't lead to other pages is like a staircase that leads nowhere, or a fake door that opens to a wall.
Content creation takes a lot of time and even more time to generate traffic and ROI. There's nothing more wasteful or frustrating than a page on your site that just looks useless without users being able to go to other places on your site and move forward in the funnel.
A few orphaned pages are usually not a big deal on their own. If they accumulate over time due to lack of overview or routine website audits, they can unnecessarily use up your crawl budget and leave your confused, frustrated users shaking their heads.
In this guide, we explain what orphaned pages are and why they harm your website's search engine optimization. We offer different ways to find them and give you valuable tips on how to avoid them in the first place.
What are orphan pages anyway?
An orphaned page is a page on your site that is neither internally nor externally linked and therefore cannot be accessed by users or search engine crawlers. They are orphaned, virtually useless, and take up space on your sitemap and domain without any web crawlers or users being able to access them.
They are not accessible from anywhere on the website and can only be found by entering the URL directly into the address bar.
Orphaned pages are different from dead pages, which can be accessed from your site but are not linked anywhere else, forcing the user to either click the "back" button or leave the site.
Orphaned pages can appear on your site for a variety of reasons, including:
Internal links are changed during a CMS or domain migration
Category pages are removed without redirecting the internal links
Landing pages or seasonal pages used for a particular promotion were never turned off or taken down
Incorrectly used CMS
Page variations used during A/B testing are removed after the person who ran the campaign leaves the company.
Do orphaned pages affect SEO?
Orphaned pages hurt your placement in the SERPs because search engine crawlers can't find them if they're not listed in your XML sitemap – meaning they can't get organic traffic.
If you have too many orphaned sites, you also risk punishment. Google's algorithm might suspect you of intentionally hiding your pages from your users, which is a black hat SEO tactic.
They also create a poor user experience when users come to your orphaned site and can't find what they're looking for. This causes them to leave the page, which affects your user metrics.
Ultimately, orphaned pages are a missed opportunity for visitors because users can't find the page through search.
How to Find Orphaned Pages with a Site Audit
Too many orphaned pages can be annoying at best and headaches at worst.
Luckily, there are several ways to find and remove them before they affect your traffic and SERP rankings.
Check your URLs against your sitemap
Your XML sitemap contains the URL of all your site's pages, videos, and files, as well as the hierarchical relationship between them. Your orphaned pages may not have links pointing to them, but if your XML sitemap can be found somewhere, it's probably there.
You can access your sitemap by typing /sitemap.xml at the end of your domain, such as www.example.com/sitemap.xml.
Zazzle Media provides a useful template for orphaned pages with a sitemap URL extractor. Navigate to the Sitemap Extractor tab and enter the URL of your sitemap under Sitemap Location.
Verification with Screaming Frog
To make a more detailed list of your orphaned URLs, you'll probably need to use a web crawling tool like Screaming Frog.
Before you start this step, you must first connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console to your Screaming Frog account. Screaming Frog offers its own step-by-step guide to integrating Google Analytics.
Under the General tab in Screaming Frog, make sure that the "Crawl new URLs discovered in Google Analytics" option is checked. Once you've connected it, make sure it's set to the Google Analytics account, property, view, and segment you want to view. Also, make sure you set the date range as far back to the account as possible.
Then navigate to Spider, then Crawl Linked XML Sitemaps and Crawl These Sitemaps and enter the URL of your sitemap.
Then crawl the site and wait for it to reach 100%. The orphaned URLs will be available in the crawl overview under "Sitemaps".
From there, you can filter the orphaned URLs and export them to a table by navigating to Reports and then Orphaned Pages.
Cross-reference your crawled URLs with a log analyzer
Another method is to export a list of URLs on your site and match them to your server's log files. Any pages that appear in your server logs, but not in your crawl data, are likely orphaned and need to be corrected.
Screaming Frog provides a guide to finding orphaned URLs with their log analyzer.
After you perform a web crawl with Screaming Frog, export it from the internal tab and drop it in the Imported URL Data window. It imports this directly into the Imported URL Data tab of the Log File Analyzer and into the database.
Change the Log File Analyzer to the "Matched With URL Data" view, where the log file data is displayed next to the SEO web crawl data.
This will show you all the URLs that exist on your server but cannot be crawled. These URLs are likely orphaned and need to be addressed.
To fix orphaned pages found in your audit
At this point, you should have a list of indexable URLs on your site that don't have internal links to. What you do next depends on whether the pages have value or not.
Even if a page doesn't have internal links, it can still get some traffic when posted on social media or elsewhere. It may also be included in your sitemap, giving it some keyword rankings that would be better off elsewhere.
In any case, you have one of three options:
Delete the web page and remove it from your sitemap and domain
Take the existing content of the page and insert it on a similar page where it can serve a better purpose before removing it.
Manually add internal links that lead to the orphaned page
Before you make your decision, there are a few things you should consider:
If the page gets keyword rankings in any way, can you improve off-page SEO and bring it closer to page 1 of the search results?
Has the site received backlinks and PageRank that can be distributed elsewhere?
Does the page serve a function? What purpose does it serve within the overall architecture of your website?
Does the site have useful content that can serve your visitors? If so, add them to the most relevant page and set up a 301 redirect to the new page
How to avoid orphaned pages in the first place
The best way to deal with orphaned sites is to prevent them from arising in the first place.
Ideally, you want to keep the number of orphaned pages as low as possible by making sure that all your pages have internal links and have a place in your site's navigation. That starts with how you manage and review your outdated content.
Instead of deleting your old posts altogether, you should consolidate them with other relevant pages on your site. Make sure you set up 301 redirects from any URLs you remove from your site to other similar pages – so make sure the pages aren't stranded on your domain in isolation.
Give your orphaned pages a home on your website
Orphaned pages are among the common technical SEO issues that aren't a big deal if they're small and localized, but can really hurt your site's user experience and SEO health if ignored for too long, similar to 301 redirects and duplicate content.
Fortunately, you have many ways to identify and fix them. While this is tedious and takes some time, it reduces the burden you would otherwise have if you tried to solve all the problems at once.
A website is similar to a car or the human body. It needs constant care and attention so that it remains functional and works as intended.
In summary, you can use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog's Web Crawler, and Log File Analyzer to identify your orphaned URLs. Then you have one of three options:
Delete the page and remove it from both your server and your sitemap
Add some internal links to the page, list them in your site's navigation, and optimize the page
Move all useful content to a similar page, redirect visitors to the new URL, and then delete the orphaned page.
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