Orphan pages can quietly undermine your SEO efforts, slipping under the radar and causing more harm than you might realize. While they often go unnoticed, their impact on your site’s performance can be serious.
In this post, let’s uncover how these pages could be adversely affecting your rankings and what you can do to regain control of your SEO strategy.
Orphan pages are web pages that exist on your site but are not linked to by any other pages. Essentially, they’re disconnected from the rest of your website’s structure, making them hard for both users and search engines to find.
Without internal links pointing to them, orphan pages can’t be easily crawled or indexed, which means their content isn’t contributing to your overall SEO efforts. This is where a reliable SEO agency can help identify and resolve these issues.
It’s important to note that there are orphaned pages that are made on purpose. Some examples include
- Landing pages for paid ads
- Private for-subscribers-only content
- Paid promotions
- Staging or testing pages
In these cases, orphan pages are not considered bad. However, you should watch out for unintended orphaning of pages that may happen after implementing changes in your navigation structure or website redesign.
How Do Orphaned Pages Affect Your SEO?
Orphan pages can hurt your overall SEO campaign if left neglected. They can particularly affect three things:
Your Page Becomes Unindexable
Orphan pages struggle with indexation because search engine crawlers rely on internal links to discover and index pages.
When a page isn’t linked anywhere on your site, crawlers can easily miss it, causing valuable content to remain hidden from search engines. This leads to a loss in potential visibility and prevents those pages from contributing to your SEO performance.
Your Search Rankings are Compromised
Since orphan pages are often excluded from a site’s internal linking structure, they don’t benefit from the flow of link equity.
The absence of internal links results in diminished authority and relevancy. It makes it difficult for these pages to rank in search results. Even if the content is of high quality, without proper indexing and links, orphan pages can underperform in rankings.
Bad User Experience
Orphan pages can negatively impact user experience by creating disjointed navigation. If users can’t find certain content because it’s not linked within your site, they might become frustrated or miss out on valuable information altogether.
As a result, you may see an increase in bounce rates and a less engaging user experience, which in turn affects your site’s overall SEO health.
How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages
Finding and fixing orphan pages is worth every effort you dedicate to maintain a great SEO standing.
Finding orphan pages is more challenging and tricky than fixing them.
But you can do so by using tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Semrush to crawl your site and identify pages that are not linked anywhere internally.
Once you’ve identified these orphan pages, the next step is to determine their value. If the content is still relevant and valuable, incorporate internal links from other pages on your site to reconnect them.
And that’s pretty much it.
Alternatively, if the orphan pages are outdated or irrelevant, consider removing or redirecting them to more current, useful pages.
If you want them deleted altogether, the no-index tagging is your best move. It tells search engines you don’t want these pages to be indexed.
Regular audits, ideally weekly, can help prevent new orphan pages from emerging, keeping your site’s structure healthy and SEO-friendly.
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