Is your website secretly holding you back? Hidden pages that search engines can’t find, known as orphan pages, could be dragging down your rankings without you even realizing it. These unlinked pages waste valuable content and disrupt your site’s structure, but here’s the good news: fixing them is easier than you think. With a few strategic tweaks, you can uncover these lost pages, integrate them into your site, and turn them into SEO gold.
What Are Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are pages without any internal links pointing to them. They’re like books locked in a library basement, with no way for readers to find them. While these pages exist on your site, search engines struggle to uncover them because they aren't included in the XML sitemap, which is essential for indexing. This means they remain hidden and out of reach for both users and search engines.
Why Are Orphan Pages Bad For Your Website
If left unchecked, orphan pages can have a negative impact on your pages’ rankings. It’s one of the common SEO mistakes that is often overlooked. Here’s why:
Reduced Crawlability
One of the primary sources search engines use to find and crawl pages is through internal links, Since orphan pages have no links pointing to them, Google bots struggle to find them which can lead to these pages being overlooked or not indexed at all. This can even hurt your rankings, especially if these pages contain valuable content or have the potential to drive traffic.
Poor Indexability
XML sitemaps help define the structure of your website and give search engines an idea about the organization of your content. Since orphan pages aren’t part of the sitemap and have no links pointing to them from other pages, they won’t be discovered by search engine bots. As a result, these pages will not be indexed, meaning they won’t appear in search results and won’t contribute to your site’s SEO performance.
Loss of Link Equity
Internal links distribute link equity, or "link juice," across your site, boosting page authority and helping your content rank higher. Orphan pages miss out on this vital authority flow, making them less valuable in search results.
Without internal links, search engines see these pages as less significant, which can weaken your site's overall authority especially if the orphan page contains important content like cornerstone articles or key service pages.
Poor User Experience
Since visitors land on your site and leave without navigating to your unlinked page, you won’t give them a reason to stay longer on your website, which could increase bounce rate and reduce engagement. Additionally, visitors can only access these pages if they enter the exact URL, which is an unlikely scenario unless they already know about it. This limits the visibility and potential for interaction with your content.
Loss of Conversion
If orphan pages contain valuable content or special offers, their isolation means you're missing out on potential conversions. These pages aren’t easily accessible to visitors, which can result in lost opportunities to drive sales, gather leads, or boost key metrics.
Loss of Link-Building Potential
Orphan pages weaken your site's link-building efforts. If a page isn’t connected to your site’s structure, any backlinks pointing to it won’t pass value to other pages which will limits the impact of your SEO strategy.
What Causes Orphan Pages
Orphan pages often happen after a site migration or redesign, where internal links can break if pages are moved or URLs change without being properly updated. Similarly, outdated or broken links can leave pages disconnected, making them hard to find and preventing both users and search engines from accessing them.
Another common cause is accidental exclusion from the XML sitemap. When pages are missed during updates or redesigns, they don’t show up in the sitemap, which means search engine crawlers can’t find them. Without internal links pointing to them, these pages remain hidden and effectively orphaned.
How To Find Orphan pages
Finding Orphan pages is actually easier than it looks, you can use different tools and simple methods to identify them, let’s break it down:
Use The Screaming Frog Tool
Enter your website and select the Links tab
Go to the Unique Inlinks section and select the dropdown option. You'll then see a list of pages that have zero internal links pointing to them
Check Your XML Sitemap
You can find orphan pages by reviewing your XML sitemap and making sure all important pages are included.
Look for Broken Links
If a page has no internal links except one pointing to a broken page, it will become orphan. With no other links connecting it to the rest of the site, both users and search engines will struggle to locate it.
You can find broken links using a tool like Ahrefs broken link checker.
You can also use Google Search Console, just head to Pages under Indexing and select the Not found (404) tab
Use Sitemap Feature in Screaming Frog
You can crawl your website and unable the sitemap and Screaming Frog will analyze your website for any orphan pages. Let’s break it down:
First you need to select the spider crawl option under “configuration”
Unable both “Crawl Linked XML Sitemap” and 3 “Crawl These Sitemaps” options, then paste your website sitemap. If you don’t know how to find it, just search for: yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
For more detail on how to find and crawl your sitemap. Check out this video
Now you can view any orphan pages within the sitemap overview tab
Utilize Crawl Depth
Crawl depth can help you spot orphan pages. During a site audit, pages that are naturally crawled will have a crawl depth value, while orphan pages won’t. Since these pages aren’t linked anywhere, they won’t appear in the crawl which makes them easy to identify.
Review Analytics
This is easy to check, just look at the pages with little to no traffic in your Google Analytics account. This could indicate that the page isn’t driving traffic because it is orphaned and therefore, isn’t easily accessed by users or search engines.