{"id":29920,"date":"2024-11-12T12:40:04","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T12:40:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/en\/blog\/wiki\/orphan-pages\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T09:23:21","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T09:23:21","slug":"Orphan_Pages","status":"publish","type":"wiki","link":"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/en\/wiki\/Orphan_Pages","title":{"rendered":"Orphan Pages"},"content":{"rendered":"

What are Orphan pages?<\/span><\/h2>\n
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\"Orphan<\/a> <\/p>\n
Figure:<\/b> Orphan Pages – Author: Seobility – License: CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Orphan pages are web pages that do not have any internal links pointing to them. Since they are not connected to other pages and can\u2019t be navigated to through a link, they are rarely viewed by people who land on a site. This causes issues from both an SEO perspective as well as a useability<\/a> perspective, potentially preventing them from showing up in the search results.\n<\/p>\n

Why websites have orphan pages<\/span><\/h2>\n

Orphan pages might be created by accident during website redesigns or even in the normal content marketing process. When adding new blog posts or redesigning a website, it can be easy to forget to assign a post to a category or to add a few links to the post on other pages on your site. These types of orphan pages can harm your site since the post or page won\u2019t rank and won\u2019t be easily accessible to your visitors.\n<\/p>\n

However, orphan pages are sometimes created on purpose if there is a specific reason why a company may want to separate a page from the rest of the site. A reason for this may be that a company wants to create a landing page<\/a> for a particular ad they are running. It may be completely out of context if navigated to from within the site, so they may choose to create an orphan page as well as block search engine crawlers from indexing it in the robots.txt file<\/a>. This can actually have SEO benefits as it reduces index bloat and prevents pages from being visible in search engines that shouldn\u2019t be.\n<\/p>\n

How orphan pages can harm your website<\/span><\/h2>\n

Due to orphan pages not being linked to anywhere on your site, they are near impossible for anyone to find. This can lead to wasted time and effort since time has gone into writing content and designing a page that can\u2019t be found by a user. They are also very difficult for crawlers<\/a> to find. Since crawlers navigate sites by following links, if there are no links to a page then they may not be able to find it. This can lead to indexing<\/a> issues that prevent the page from being visible on search engines.\n<\/p>\n

How can you find and fix orphan pages on your site?<\/span><\/h2>\n

Although fixing orphan pages is easy, finding them is a lot more challenging. Since orphan pages are not linked to, crawlers have a difficult time finding them and this means that it may be hard to discover them using software. However, there are some places where you can look, namely:\n<\/p>\n