What are orphan pages and how do they affect your website?

Orphan pages are pages on your website that you can't reach by following links from your homepage. An orphan page is still online, but visitors can't click their way to it, and it's harder for search engines to discover. Orphan pages usually appear by accident, when a page is published without a link or loses its last link in a redesign. You can find them by comparing a crawl of your website with a full list of your pages.

What is an orphan page and how do pages become orphans?

A page becomes an orphan when no path of links leads to it from your homepage. It may have links from other orphan pages, but none from the pages people actually use. Visitors can still reach it by typing its address, by following an external link from another website or by finding it in search results. Search engines that follow your internal links from page to page never reach it that way.

Pages usually become orphans in one of these ways:

• A new page never got a link. You published it but didn't add it to the menu or link to it from a related page.
• An offer or campaign page lost its links. The campaign ended and the links came down, but the page stayed live.
• Old pages were left behind in a redesign. They're still published, but the new menu and pages no longer point to them.
• A product went out of stock. It was taken out of your shop's categories, but its page is still online.
• A test page stayed online. A page you made to try out a design or a feature is still published after the work is done.

Are orphan pages bad for SEO?

Yes, orphan pages can hold back your SEO. Google uses links to find new pages to crawl, and as a signal when it judges how relevant a page is. A page without internal links is harder for Google to discover, and it misses the signal that links from your other pages would give it.

Google can still find an orphan page, for example when it's listed in your XML sitemap or another website links to it. A sitemap entry doesn't replace an internal link, though. The page still misses the links that visitors follow and that pass value from one page of your site to another. Google advises linking to each page that matters to you from at least one other page of your site.

Orphan pages cost you visitors too. Without a link to click, people need to know a page's address to find it, so a useful guide or offer page goes unseen. Leave an old orphan page that nobody visits for later. It's worth acting when there are many orphan pages, or when an important page is among them.

How to find orphan pages on your website

You need a list of every page your website has, and a list of every page you can reach by following its links. A page on the first list that's missing from the second is an orphan. A crawler, a tool that follows your links from the homepage the way a search engine does, gives you the second list. On its own, it only finds pages that are linked, so it can't give you the first list.

For the first list, use your XML sitemap or the page list in your content management system (CMS). Pages that Google Analytics or Google Search Console has visitor or performance data for belong on it too.

On a small site, you can often do the check by hand in a spreadsheet. Paste the page list from your CMS into it, and tick off each page you reach by clicking through your menu, category pages and articles. Any page left without a tick is an orphan.

A site: search on Google lists pages Google has indexed. You type site: followed by your domain, with no space in between, such as site:mapleandthimble-crafts.co.uk. The search doesn't tell you whether a page is linked, and the list isn't always complete.

Find orphan pages with Screaming Frog

The SEO Spider from Screaming Frog is a crawler that can crawl your sitemap as part of a crawl and fetch Google Analytics and Search Console data for the URLs it crawls. It then finds the orphan pages among the URLs that each of these three sources lists. Without a licence, which you pay for each year, the SEO Spider crawls only up to 500 URLs and won't connect these sources.

1. Make sure you have an SEO Spider licence, which you need to crawl the whole site and connect the extra URL sources.
2. Set the crawl to include your XML sitemap, so pages that only the sitemap lists are crawled too.
3. If you use Google Analytics, connect it and choose to crawl the new URLs it finds.
4. If your site is in Google Search Console, connect that as well and choose to crawl the new URLs it finds.
5. Enter your website's address, start the crawl and wait until it reaches 100%.
6. Run the crawl analysis, which fills the Orphan URLs filters.
7. Check the Orphan URLs filters under the Sitemaps, Analytics and Search Console tabs, or export the combined Orphan Pages report.

The report shows where each orphan page was found. That helps you tell an old sitemap entry apart from a live page that still gets visitors.

How to fix orphan pages: should you link, redirect or remove them?

Decide what each orphan page is still for before you add any links, so visitors don't land on outdated content.

• Link it if the page is still useful. Add a link from at least one related page, and from the menu or a category page if it's important.
• Redirect it if a newer page has taken its place. A permanent (301) redirect sends visitors and Google from the old address to the new page.
• Remove it if nobody needs it, nothing replaces it and no other website links to it, as far as the Links report in Google Search Console shows. Unpublish it, so its address returns a 404 (not found) error.

Start with the orphan pages that bring in visitors or explain what you sell. When you link them, use link text that says what the page is about, such as the name of the product or topic. If a page you'd like to remove still gets visits or links from other websites, redirect it to the closest related page instead.

Some pages are orphans on purpose, such as a landing page you only use for an ad campaign. Leave those unlinked and add a noindex tag, a short line in the page's code. It tells Google and other search engines that support it not to show the page in their results, as long as your robots.txt file doesn't block the page. Your CMS may have a setting that adds it for you, so you don't need to edit the code. When you've finished, update your XML sitemap so it lists the pages you kept and not the ones you removed.

Our SEO experts work on your content, links and technical fixes, and send you monthly updates on how your site performs.

How to stop new orphan pages appearing

Finding orphan pages takes time, so it's worth stopping new ones before they appear. Each time you publish a page, link to it from a related page straight away. If you take a page out of the menu or end an offer, decide straight away: a link elsewhere, a redirect or removal. Old pages are easily left behind in a redesign or when you move your website to another CMS. Afterwards, crawl your website again and compare the result with your sitemap.

These habits keep every important page linked, so visitors and Google can reach all the pages you care about. Whether those pages then rank well is the next step, and you can get help from our SEO team with ongoing optimisation.