Why do orphan pages matter?
Search engines find most pages by following links. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says the vast majority of new pages it finds every day are found through links.
Google’s own advice on links is that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. An orphan page breaks that rule, so it may be crawled rarely, and readers browsing your site will never reach it.
How do pages become orphaned?
Most orphan pages are created by accident. Common causes are:
- A landing page built for an ad campaign and never added to the site menu.
- A blog post that dropped off the paginated blog index and has no links from other posts.
- A redesign or menu change that removed the only link to a page.
- Pages created by a CMS, such as tag or test pages, that nobody linked to.
How do you find orphan pages?
Compare the pages you know exist with the pages a crawler can reach by following links.
- 1Gather a full list of your URLs from your XML sitemap, your CMS and the Pages tab in Google Search Console.
- 2Crawl your site with a site crawler, starting from the home page, to list every page reachable by links.
- 3Compare the two lists. Pages in the first list but missing from the crawl are orphans.
- 4Decide for each orphan whether it should be linked, merged into another page or removed.
What does fixing an orphan page look like?
Here is an example of a useful guide that had no internal links, before and after three links were added from related posts.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Internal links pointing to the page | 0 | 3 |
| Average position for main query | 24.5 | 12.8 |
| Impressions a month | 180 | 1,240 |
| Clicks a month | 2 | 31 |
Frequently asked questions
Is a page in my sitemap still an orphan?
Yes. A sitemap helps search engines find the URL, but it does not give the page internal links, so readers still cannot reach it and it gets no signal from the rest of your site.
Can an orphan page still be indexed?
It can, for example through a sitemap or a link from another site. It is just harder to find and usually ranks worse than a well-linked page.
Should every orphan page be linked?
Only the ones worth keeping. Old campaign pages, test pages and thin duplicates are often better removed or redirected than linked.
What anchor text should I use when linking to an orphan page?
Descriptive words that say what the page is about. Google notes that good anchor text helps both people and Google understand the page being linked to.