How to find and fix your website’s orphan pages
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When talking about orphan pages on a website, we’re referring to pages that exist but have no internal links to them from your other pages. Without internal links, these pages are much more difficult for both users and search engines to discover. You may have heard that orphan pages are bad for SEO, but that’s not always the case, rather than being directly bad, think of them as not contributing to the overall content strategy for your website. Your orphan pages could have the best content on them for your subject, but if they aren’t discoverable by users or search engines, they’re not serving the intended purpose of being accessible to users.
Occasionally, you’ll have orphaned pages which are purposefully built to be isolated from the main website. The most common example of this would be a landing page that has been built only to support your paid marketing efforts. These are fine as they are likely blocked entirely by your robots.txt file and will have a noindex, nofollow tag to prevent them from appearing in organic searches.
Structure, CMS’, and migrations: What causes orphan pages?
Think of your website as a library of content, it’s organised in a way that makes sense to a user so they can find the content they are looking for quickly and easily through navigation. Users and search engines depend on clear navigation choices to help them move through your website to find the content they are looking for.
There are many reasons that you might have orphaned pages on your website, but here are the ones we find are the most common.
Poor Website Structure – When you’re adding content to your website but not planning how that content fits into your overall website architecture, it’s common for pages to get lost. If you add a page that isn’t linked from your navigation, or internally linked from any other content on the website, it’s an orphaned page that can’t be discovered. If the page exists in the sitemap, a search engine will likely find it, but it won’t rank nearly as well as it would with a planned internal linking strategy.
Technical or CMS Issues – You don’t need to a be a website developer to understand that sometimes, CMS platforms can have a wobble whether that’s because of an update, or it hasn’t functioned correctly when you’ve moved a page to a different section, or changed its URL. No CMS is perfect, which is why it’s so important to double check the impact of any updates to the CMS framework or plugins.
Migrations – We find a lot that when a website is migrated to a new platform, or a new website design is being launched, things change that could impact the discoverability of your pages. Any sort of change like this should have a thorough content migration plan so you know exactly where all of your content exists and that any internal links are still valid. Don’t just rely on redirects.
Old Content – Over time, your website changes, the priorities on the website will change, and you’ll move things in and out of your main navigation areas, this can lead to older content still existing on a URL, but perhaps its lesser importance has meant you haven’t considered the impact of the changes made. If that page was only linked to from the navigation but you’ve removed it, it’ll now become an orphaned page.
How to find orphan pages on your website
Finding orphan pages on your website is a task that requires time and effort. You’ll need to use multiple methods, including manual checks, and you’ll need to work through each to make sure you find as many pages as possible so you can put a plan together to fix them.
Fixing them will come down to a few different options, if the content is high quality and still relevant, you’ll want to improve your internal linking strategy to those pages. If the content is old and no longer needed, you’ll want to remove the content and add a 301 redirect to a relevant page on your website. Which you choose will be dependent entirely on your own judgement, so we’ll leave that to you. However, we can share some methods to help you track down those pesky orphan pages.
Using SEO crawling tools
You may be wondering why we’re recommending SEO crawling tools when if the page is not internally linked, they shouldn’t be able to discover them, but that’s not always the case.
- Screaming Frog – Use Screaming Frog to crawl your website, but before you hit start, go to the configuration menu and click crawl config, and you’ll see the window below. Make sure you enable ‘Crawl Linked XML Sitemaps’, and you can then choose between auto-discovering your sitemaps via the robots.txt file, or you can manually enter the URLs of your XML Sitemaps. Orphan pages may not be linked to, but they should appear in your sitemap. Once your website has finished crawling, you can go to reports > orphaned pages, and Screaming Frog will create you a report detailing what orphan pages it has found.
- Ahrefs – The site audit tool on Ahrefs can help you discover orphan pages in the ‘content gap’ report. This details pages that have been indexed by search engines but don’t have any internal links pointing to them.
- SEMRush – The audit tool on SEMRush does something similar to Ahrefs but instead reports back on pages which are receiving traffic but no internal links have been found pointing to those pages.
Combined, those three will put you on a good heading to undercover any orphan pages you might have.
Using GA4 and Search Console to discover orphan pages
- GA4 – In your pages and screens report on GA4, widen the date range as much as possible, and then look for pages that are receiving little to no traffic at the moment, this is an indication that the page could be orphaned. If it’s not, you’ve also discovered some pages that perhaps need to improve to get more traffic to them.
- Search Console – In Search Console, you want to head to the coverage report, and in the same way as GA4, extend the date range and look for pages that are receiving little to no clicks and impressions. It’s possible that these could be orphaned pages. Again here, if they’re not, these are great candidates for page and content reviews in the future so you can improve them.
A manual site audit could help uncover those lost pages
This is the most time-consuming method, but it will also be the most accurate. Manually extracting all of the pages/posts of your website and cross-referencing them with your other audit tools. Creating an index of your content from your XML sitemap could also be a great way to better understand how the content on your site is structured and where improvements could be made.
This method will be easier if you use a common CMS such as WordPress. There are also plugins available which could help with the task such as Yoast, which you may already be using as your primary SEO plugin.
Backlink analysis for all pages of your website
The primary reason for this one is to find pages that have backlinks, and therefore could be indexed, but still don’t have internal links for them. If the content is high quality and has been on your website for a long time, it could have naturally picked up some backlinks.
Again here you’ll need to cross-reference your findings with your original content audit from Screaming Frog for example, and see the results for each page.
Combined SEO Tools such as Ahrefs and Moz also have the ability to report on internal linking when they crawl the website and have dedicated orphan page reports. This combined with their backlink data and index data can help you see a fuller picture of your website structure and where it can be improved.
How to fix orphan pages on your website
Now that you’ve found your orphan pages, and you’re confident after completing the steps above that you’ve found them all, you can put a plan together on how to fix them. Luckily, fixing them is much easier than finding them.
- Adding internal links – If your orphan page is valuable and you want to keep it, put together a plan on where you can add internal links to it from other pages. The links could be from within existing content, or it’s very important, from the main navigation sections in the header or footer. The key here is to make sure the links are discoverable by users and search engines.
- Remove and redirect – If the orphan page is very old and holds little value now, you may decide to get rid of it altogether. That’s absolutely fine, just remember to put a 301 redirect in place for the URL to another relevant page on your website. This will help capture any traffic arriving from search engines if the page is indexed or bookmarks etc.
What’s next?
One of the key things to do now that you’ve fixed your orphan pages is to not let it happen again. Create a clear content hub strategy which will allow you to keep tabs on pages being added or removed on the website and how internal links will be impacted. This way you’ll be actively preventing any pages from becoming orphans again.
All content on your website should have a purpose for both users and SEO. If a page is orphaned it becomes arguably useless for them both. If you have any other methods you use for finding orphan pages, we’d love to hear them.
Hiring a dedicated SEO Agency to help keep on top of things like this could also save you time. The experience they have will mean they are always looking out not just for issues with orphan pages, but hundreds of other things that could also be impacting your organic visibility. If you need some help with SEO, please get in touch and we can discuss the best options for you.
