Orphan Page: How Does It Affect SEO?

Despite your best efforts, some of your website’s pages may have the potential to rank yet are overlooked by Google. These are pages that have been left behind.

These are pages that you may have put a lot of time and effort into constructing, but they may not be receiving any organic traffic because they aren’t part of your website’s structure or the SERPs.

However, purchasing or creating links to these pages will not address the problem. This is because they’ll still be orphan pages because they’re not linked to anything else on your site.

It is for this reason that you must use caution when constructing links. If you construct a backlink on the URL of an orphan page by mistake, the link juice will not filter through to your other pages.

From an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) standpoint, identify and correct these orphan pages so that they can be indexed. 

In this blog, you are going to learn about Orphan page SEO. 

But… in order to do this correctly, you must first understand what orphan pages are, how to locate them, and how to correct them.

So, let’s get started with Orphan page SEO.

What Are Orphan Pages?

Orphan pages are pages that can be indexed but don’t have any internal links. Orphan pages exist outside the site structure since there are no links to them from anywhere else on your site.

Orphan pages can’t be accessible from any place on your site without internal links. This makes it considerably more difficult, although not impossible, to locate certain pages.

There are a couple of ways to get to an orphan pages:

• One way is through referrals, such as when another website links to it or when a newsletter refers to it. 

• Another way is to use organic search, which is when a page ranks for specific queries. Then there are the cases of redirects when other URLs are routed to these pages.

It is still feasible to locate and view orphan pages, but it is a difficult effort. Users can’t find these pages very quickly, and search engines can’t find them either, which isn’t helpful for your website.

We’ll go through this in greater detail later.

Why Do Websites Have Orphan Pages?

Orphan pages might emerge as a result of website redesigns or even the typical content marketing process. It’s easy to forget to assign a post to a category or to include a few links to the post on other pages on your site while adding new blog posts or revamping a website.

These types of orphan pages might be detrimental to your site because they do not rank and are not easily visible to your visitors.

Orphan pages are sometimes generated on purpose if a corporation needs to separate a page from the rest of the site for a specific reason. This may be due to a company’s desire to generate new products.

The Impact Of Orphan Pages On SEO

The primary reason for orphan pages needing to be corrected is determined by your objectives. If you think the orphan page is important, make sure it’s accessible and usable.

On the other hand, if you determine that the page isn’t valuable, the reason for fixing it becomes more challenging.

Have An Impact On Your SEO And Ability To Rank

Search engines will presume a page isn’t valuable if it has no links leading to it. Unusable pages are also a waste of server resources and crawler expenses.

When a page exists on a website but has no relation to other sites, search engines dislike it.

People have attempted to hide pages like this from users in the past (though not the current one).

In the past, black-hat SEO tactics that violated search standards were used to hide pages like these from users (but not search engines).

Orphan pages should be archived, indexed, or redirected to guarantee they don’t affect your page rankings or link health.

Orphan Pages Are Problematic For Users

Users will have difficulties finding orphan pages that contain high-quality content that should attract considerable traffic to your website and result in conversions if they aren’t included in your site’s structure. This results in a waste of time and resources spent on developing content for these pages.

It’s a different story if your orphan pages were intentionally not linked to but were still accessible to users. Visitors that arrive on these pages may encounter obsolete or irrelevant information, resulting in a negative user experience. 

You now understand what orphan pages are, how to locate them, and, most importantly, how to correct them. 

Features Of An Orphan Page

To help you recognize and locate orphan pages on your site, below are some frequent features.

There Are No Inbound Links On An Orphan Page

An orphan page’s defining characteristic is this. Your page is not an orphan if it has even one incoming link, whether it’s from the homepage or an old blog post. 

If you have pages on your site that only have one link leading to them, you might consider beefing up your internal linking and adding a few more.

Orphan Page Is A Live Page

Some of the characteristics of an orphan page can be found in sandboxing, test pages, and the like, but the important difference is that a true orphan page has value for people and is alive, but inaccessible. 

Even though it has a 200 server status, the fact that people have no method of getting to it is part of the orphan page problem.

Even if a page is indexed or a tool indicates it isn’t, it could be an orphan.

This is the most difficult attribute to verify because it necessitates some investigation. While some orphan pages discovered and classed as such turn out to be just that, others may not.

Orphan Pages Can Consume A Significant Amount Of Crawl Money

Having a significant number of low-value orphan pages can eat up a valuable crawl budget that could be better spent crawling your site’s most important pages and adding new content. 

As a result, these orphan pages could be sabotaging your SEO efforts!

Orphan pages don’t perform well even if they are found and indexed by search engines.

Links convey authority, relevance, and quality to search engines. Without this, pages will have low page authority and will be difficult to rank well.

Making orphan pages (again) a part of your site structure greatly improves their SEO effectiveness. The orphan page will perform better as a result of link authority from other areas of the site. If the orphan page has a trimmed-down navigation menu (for example, if it’s a landing page or campaign page), bringing it in will help other sites perform better as well.

User Experience Might Be Hampered By Orphan Pages

Orphan pages don’t give users the best experience.

If consumers find the page organically, it may contain out-of-date information, such as information about a previous event or a deal that has passed. Alternatively, if the page still includes useful content and the user wants to return to it later, they will have trouble finding it.

Of course, if you want users to find and visit this page, they won’t be able to do so from anywhere else on the site. In either case, this makes it difficult and degrades the user experience. 

The Most Common Causes Behind Orphan Pages

So, we already know that orphan pages are bad for SEO. But how do they come to be?

Here are a few of the reasons why.

Internal Linking Ignorance

Orphan pages are common among website owners that do not focus on internal linking. 

To avoid this, create a manual SOP for internal linking or automate the process of adding necessary internal links to each new page of your site.

Issues With Website Migration

Another major cause of orphan pages is inefficient website migration. When moving a large website (particularly an eCommerce site), make sure the URLs are properly tracked so that no internal links are broken or pages are lost.

Inadequate Website Management

Orphan pages are sometimes the result of sloppy website administration. 

For example, website owners may develop them on purpose in the form of campaign-specific landing pages or private areas of your site that are not accessible to regular visitors.

However, they frequently forget to delete these pages after they have served their function. Similarly, eCommerce sites remove links to out-of-stock or discontinued product pages but fail to remove them entirely. As a result, these pages remain orphaned on your site.

There Aren’t Enough SEO Audits

Orphan pages must be avoided by performing regular SEO housekeeping. As a result, make sure you conduct frequent SEO audits and have the tools and filters in place to spot them as soon as they appear.

Otherwise, they’ll be content to sit quietly in the corner of the room.

How To Find Orphan Pages On Website 

The process is quite easy to find an orphan page on website. You just need to follow this 4 step process:

1. Get a list of all of your web page. 

2. Crawl your website on web crawler with zero inbound internal links. 

3. Get the results and analyze them.

4. Resolve the orphan page, if you find any.

How To Fix Orphan Pages In 5 Easy Steps

We’ve already discussed orphan pages and why they exist. It’s now time to look for any orphan sites that could be harming your SEO. 

You’ll be able to rapidly detect and fix any orphan pages that are now on your site, as well as catch any unlinked pages that may appear in the future, by following these five steps.

Make A Comprehensive List Of All Of Your Website Pages

Before you start looking for orphan pages, make a list of all the pages that are currently active on your site. This can be accomplished in one of two ways:

i. Use The Sitemap File

A sitemap is a map to your site that can help your site become user-friendly by allocating the right content indexed in a linear fashion. Linear fashion helps crawlers to easily extract your data as a result landing your page in the top ranks.

Your sitemap is a file that contains information about your website’s pages, videos, and other files, as well as their relationships. Your sitemap should refresh every time you add a new page or post if you’re using a content management system (CMS).

Read More: Sitemap Structure: Why Sitemap Is Important For SEO

ii. Prepare A List Of Your Site’s Unique URLs

A list is always to the rescue whenever you find yourself in dilemma. Preparing a list always keeps you updated and also gives you the flexibility to take appropriate steps that can help you boost your website. 

If you’re not sure if your sitemap contains all of your site’s pages or if downloading it isn’t an option, you’ll need to prepare a list of URLs directly in your CMS (content management system). This can be done through a plugin or by simply requesting CMS log files from your IT team.

You’ll have to manually put this list into your website crawler once you’ve downloaded it as a Google Sheet or spreadsheet.

Crawl Through The Internet

By now you must have gathered your data sources. 

Great!

Make sure the more you gather data and put it on your site in a structured way the better are the chances for the crawlers to fetch your data as the data is user-friendly and more likable to rank at the top league.

It’s time you should get started with site crawling. Use your SEO tool to locate dead-end pages that don’t have at least one inbound internal link connecting to them.

Set up a recurring crawl while you are arranging your audit. In this manner, any future URLs will be caught BEFORE they start harming your SEO.

Examine The Findings Of Your Audit

Examine the results after your audit is finished to see whether any orphan URLs were detected. Don’t get rid of them yet. Instead, focus on their goals and how your visitors interact with the website.

Go to your web analytics program to see how much value these pages are providing and what kind of traffic they’re receiving.

Here’s a list of questions you or your team should ask:

• Is there any traffic on the pages?
• If so, what are the sources of traffic?
• Are they being used as a landing page for a campaign?
• These unlinked pages, for example, may be highlighted in a PPC campaign or a social media competition.
• How many visits and page views do the orphan page receive, and how does this compare to the overall traffic and page views on your site?
• Do site users use another method to access the page, such as an on-site search?
• What is the behavior of visitors to the page?
• Do they click on further links on the website or instantly leave?

Fix The Orphaned Pages

You’ll be in the best position to decide what to do next once you’ve taken the time to understand the purpose of your unlinked pages.

Depending on the page’s goals, there are three options for resolving the problem:

• Maintain the page and include internal links from other pages. If the page is essential and valuable, or if you want it to be found in organic search engine results, this is the best way.

• It should be added to your archive page. Pull the plug and move on if they’re old URLs that aren’t providing any use in your marketing initiatives and aren’t receiving any traffic.

• Keep things the way they are. Orphan pages aren’t always linked for a purpose. As long as these pages are still providing a business requirement, it’s fine to leave them unmodified and unlinked.

Repeat If Necessary

It’s a good idea to schedule site audits in the future, even after you’ve examined your site for any orphan pages. Pages can become orphaned as you add more material to your website or make changes to it. 

By keeping in mind the above-mentioned points, you can easily detect the mistakes and you’ll be able to spot these pages and rectify any mistakes as soon as they emerge if you conduct your audit regularly. 

Orphan Page Checker Tool

There are lots of orphan page checker tools available in the market. 

Let’s discuss some:

1. Google Search Console:

Google search console is a tool provided by Google for free. The tool can help you find orphan pages along with the sitemaps of the website. 

2. Screaming Frog:
Screaming frog is another tool to get details about orphan page SEO. the tool is able to find all the orphan tools just in a moment. You just need to crawl your website once.

Conclusion

For any business owner, orphan pages are a pain. Orphan sites are likely affecting your SEO without you realizing it, reducing the user experience, making your sitemap unnecessarily complex, and squandering your crawl budget.

Fortunately, locating and fixing orphan pages is not difficult. You can meticulously interlink your long-forgotten webpages, just like a spider, and delete any that no longer serve your website.

We’ve gone over what orphan pages are, how they affect your website’s SEO, and how you can detect them. We’ve talked about some specific steps you can take right now to clean up your website and tie up any loose orphaned pages.

We’ve also included some pointers on how to avoid creating orphan pages in the future.  For any further queries, get in touch with us.

FAQs

1. Do orphaned pages hurt SEO?

Yes, orphan pags do hurt SEO. a useful page that is orphened, can hurt the SEO of your website. If a valued page could bring you high traffic and that is not linked can cause your website big trouble.

2. How to fix orphan page?

The ways to fix orphan pages comes in stages. First of all, you need to perform a site audit and then, you will find the issues some orphan pages and you can fix them.

3. How do I delete orphan links?

The answer is simple… Just move the page into trash and you are done.

4. How do I find hidden web pages?

Steps to find hidden pages on your site. 

• Enter [domain name]/robots.txt in the browser’s location field.
• Use the site address in place of the [domain name].
• Enter the key and you are done