What Are Orphan Pages in SEO?
Orphan pages, as the name implies, are those that have no links to other pages. This implies they are tough to find for both people and search engines. This is related to how search engines work, and they do not work by searching the internet. In summary, they utilize software known as bots to follow all of the links on a website, create an alphabetical list of the content of the pages visited, and when a user performs a query (or search), they search the index and return results, if any.
Your orphaned pages can still be accessed by putting the URL into the browser’s URL box or via external links. Orphaned pages might still be. Once your website is crawled, it gets indexed, but search engines may not detect it right away.
How Orphan Pages Affect Your Website
Orphan pages are not inherently terrible; it all relies on whether you have a purpose for them as they are. As we discussed in the blog category example, you may choose to temporarily disable a blog category and hide a portion of the material from bots and visitors, but keep it in case you wish to organize it differently or resume it to your website at a later point.
Nevertheless, if a page or its content is valuable to you or your website, leaving it orphaned is undesirable. For starters, a page with no links to it has low page authority, and Google and other search engines may opt to no-index it. This means that the page will drive no free traffic to your website.
Even when they are indexed, orphan pages perform poorly. This is because Google and other Search engines consider links when determining whether a page is authoritative or relevant. This includes links to other areas of your website.
Finally, if a person stumbles onto the page, it is likely to be outdated or include inaccurate information. So, in addition to being terrible for SEO, orphan pages are poor for the user experience.
search engines consider links when determining whether a page is authoritative or relevant. This includes links to other areas of your website.
How can orphaned sitemap pages affect SEO?
Contrary to popular opinion, search engines can discover any page you make for your website. Crawlers that may still indexing the page as part of your sitemap, regardless of whether it was previously linked, had external website links, or was submitted for indexation.
No watch operates properly when the strap links are broken. It’s comparable with orphan pages. Google recognizes that these pages have no linkages to the remainder of your site and so considers them useless.
But how do orphan pages affect SEO?
- Low traffic • Tough to find during user journey
- states no significance to your sitemap.
- The system penalizes you for intentionally hiding the page.
- Neglecting these factors can negatively impact your SEO efforts.
Here’s the thing: Google’s algorithm was specifically intended to locate and reward efficient, intuitive sites that provide meaningful material to users. The algorithm prefers websites that are relevant, easy to use, and practical on the first page of a search query. Thus, the algorithm prefers websites that are relevant, easy to use, and functioning on the first page of a search query. Google has a predilection for punishing websites that include pages that appear to have no association with the other information on their website. It doesn’t matter whether your orphan pages can increase organic traffic. If there are no internal hyperlinks, the algorithm assumes that the page is intended to be concealed from end users. This violates Google’s Guidelines and may harm your term ranks, as Google’s algorithm is notorious for harshly penalizing websites that employ questionable SEO practices.
Why Are They Called “Orphan”?
Orphan pages can occur for a variety of reasons, including old pages that have been unlinked but continue to be published, site architecture concerns, sold-out products that are still available, and the CMS creating new unknown URLs as part of its page designs, among others.
These pages cannot be accessible from anywhere on your website unless you use internal links. This makes it much more tricky although not impossible, to identify specific pages.
How Orphan Pages Are formed
A theme or plugin may also build a page automatically, but any links to it are later erased or not made at all. It’s also possible that you established a page for a one-time event and then forgot to delete it, despite removing all of the links.
Orphan pages can also be produced on purpose: for example, you may decide to ditch a blog category but leave the content intact.
Orphan pages are not inherently terrible; it all relies on whether you have a purpose for them as they are. As we discussed in the blog category example, you may choose to temporarily disable a blog category and hide a portion of your content from bots and visitors, but keep it in case you wish to organize it differently or return it to your website at a later point.
However, if a page or its content is valuable to you or your website, leaving it orphaned is really undesirable.
Manual Mistakes in Content Management
For starters, a page with no links to it has low page authority, and Google and other search engines may opt to no index it. This means that the page will drive no organic traffic to your website.
Even when they are indexed, orphan pages perform poorly. This is because Google and other search engines consider links when determining whether a page is authoritative or relevant. This includes links to other areas of your website.
Finally, if a person stumbles into the page, it is likely to be outdated or include inaccurate information. Orphan pages are not only bad for SEO, but they are also awful for user experience.
How to Fix Orphan Pages
Fixing orphan pages entails a variety of actions based on your goals for the page or your website as a whole. Aside from that, you should conduct a thorough audit of all of your pages.
Once you’ve found an orphaned page, you must determine what to do with it. Basically, you have two options: eliminate or improve.
If the page is no longer needed, delete it. This includes referring to it from other pages on your website, including in the drop-down menus, and generally locating it in your sitemap.
If you delete a page but other websites continue to link to it, both users and search engine crawlers will receive a 404 error. You can contact the other website’s administrator and request that they change the link, or you might create a 404 error page. A 404 redirect plugin can also be used to create a redirect. You don’t have to worry about search engine bots: they will cease indexing pages with a 404 status code. If you are still concerned, you can request that Google re-crawl your site.
How do I discover and fix orphaned web pages?
You can use a simple 5-step procedure to detect and address any orphan pages on your website:
- Get a complete list of your current website pages.
- Conduct a website crawl to identify pages with no internal links. • Analyze audit results. • Address any orphan pages discovered.
- Rerun the audit often to identify new unlinked pages.
Let’s briefly go over each of these steps.
Compile a complete list of your present website pages.
Pointing your preferred website analysis solution to your home page and hoping it to detect orphan site pages would fail since, by definition, orphan web pages are not connected to from any domain page. The crawler will never locate them. Instead, you must specify an entire set of site URLs that the crawler should inspect. There are several ways to obtain the URL list:
How to Find Orphan Pages using Ahrefs
Orphan sites are bad news for any business, particularly online retailers and organizations that rely on search engine traffic to increase brand awareness among their target audience.
Unfortunately, identifying orphan pages in your sitemap is not as simple as scanning your own website. This is because Google’s crawlers continue to think of these pages as part of your website, even if they are orphaned.
One simple method for locating orphan sites is to run an SEO site audit utilizing Ahrefs using the SERP information acquired from this audit to figure out and remove any dead pages. Ahrefs is one of the market’s leading site audit tools, crawling every page on your website and flagging any SEO concerns before providing specific suggestions on how to repair them.
Here’s a step-by-step approach on identifying orphan pages with the Ahrefs Site Audit tool.
Here’s how you can verify your orphan pages in a nutshell.
Log in > Site Audit > Choose Project > Under Top problems, pick Orphan page.
Log into Ahrefs:
We recommend Ahrefs for all SEO site audits because it is one of the most efficient and robust tools on the market.
Enter the Site Auditing tool. You may get a thorough summary of your website’s health right here. The dashboard appears like this:
View your overview.
From here, you can obtain a summary of your site audit. This page will provide you an overview of your website’s health and some critical insights into what’s affecting its SEO.
The infamous ‘Orphan Page Error:’
One of the tabs in Ahref’s site audit tool provides a summary of any faults or errors. If you have any orphan pages, they will be mentioned here along other areas of concern.
They are both valuable to you and serve as a sitemap. However, Smart Crawl provides more options for settings, reporting, and caching. It goes beyond Google XML Sitemap’s limited capabilities.
Smart Crawl also contains other SEO features such as schema markup, title and meta descriptions, a one-click setup process, Hub integration, and much more!
So, given that Smart Crawl provides additional XML sitemap features as well as other SEO adjustments, we’d recommend Smart Crawl. However, if you prefer simplicity, the Google XML Sitemap generator may be ideal for you.
What about the content that does not generate traffic?
Unfortunately, many of the technologies used by online marketers are not up to the task. This includes:
- Google Analytics does not track 0 pageviews, while Webalizer does not count 0 hits.
- Sitemaps may not include the complete website.
- The site operator may be erroneous, resulting in missing pages.
- Google Webmaster Tools reports on a limited number of pages.
- The situation with Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to that of Google Webmaster Tools, but more serious.