Orphan pages are not linked from any other internal page, making them hard for users and search engines to find.
What Are Orphan Pages?
Orphan pages are pages on your website that have no internal links pointing to them. That means users and search engine crawlers can’t navigate to these pages from any other page on your site—they’re essentially disconnected from your website’s structure.
These pages may still exist and even be indexed if submitted via an XML sitemap, but without internal links, they are considered isolated and can hurt your site’s SEO performance.
Why Orphan Pages Are Bad for SEO:
- 🔍 Difficult to Discover: Search engines rely on internal linking to crawl and understand site structure. Orphan pages are often missed.
- 🧭 Poor User Experience: Visitors can’t access valuable content if it’s not linked anywhere.
- 🚫 Wasted Crawl Budget: Crawlers may skip orphan pages, meaning they won’t get indexed or updated regularly.
- ⛔ No Link Equity: Since no internal links point to them, they don’t receive authority passed from other pages.
Common Causes of Orphan Pages:
- Unlinked landing pages created for ads or email campaigns
- Legacy content not linked from current navigation
- Publishing a new post but forgetting to add internal links
- Broken or deleted menus or category links
How to Fix Orphan Pages:
- Use a crawler tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs to identify orphan pages
- Cross-reference with your sitemap to find indexed but unlinked pages
- Add relevant internal links to the orphan page from related blog posts or hub pages
- Update your navigation or related post widgets to include them
- Remove or redirect outdated orphan pages that no longer provide value
Best Practices:
- Conduct regular SEO audits to identify new orphan pages
- Integrate all important pages into your site’s internal linking structure
- Use topic clusters to naturally include links to key content
- Avoid creating pages with no follow-up linking strategy
