What is an orphan page?

Orphan pages on your website are not linked to any other page or section. This means that a user cannot access the page without the direct URL. Furthermore, search engine crawlers cannot follow these pages from another page, so they rarely index them. Your pages must be linked to other carriers for crawlers to find them. Consider it a web for a spider to crawl through. The spider will have difficulty moving from one location to another if parts of it are broken. Orphan pages, moreover, represent lost opportunities to acquire and engage customers, and they can increase your bounce rate. Fortunately, orphan pages can be easily fixed, resulting in a loss of page traffic, retention, and revenue and harming your SEO success.

Are Orphan Pages a Negative Thing?

To keep the universe in balance, there is always darkness where there is light. While orphan pages aren't flawed in and of themselves, they can be mistaken for doorway pages. All the content on the doorway pages is similar, but it's been tweaked slightly to target different keyword variations. This is common when a company wants to target hundreds of cities with individually targeted pages, where only the city name and state are interchangeable throughout each page (for example, 'Best Home Security in City, State'). Google wants to see pages built on something other than a plethora of minor keyword variations to provide quality search results. Suppose an orphan page is submitted in an XML sitemap without a noindex meta tag and contains information that is too targeted or plagiarized from other carriers. In that case, it risks being mistaken for a doorway page. This page would now be visible to Google as something you requested to be indexed, but it would not be part of your site architecture. That's a red flag for Google, and red flags can lead to penalties, either algorithmically or manually. Because non-doorway orphan pages can result in a Google penalty, they should be avoided whenever possible. On the other hand, some pages may be intentionally orphaned to create landing pages for PPC or email campaigns. Because PPC and email campaigns are often campaign-specific, marketers don't want anyone to find them outside the campaign's context. PPC/email landing pages usually have a stripped-down design that directs users to a single goal, so they may only include part of the site's link architecture. Always remember that a user or a search engine should be able to access every page on your website. Any pages not included in that scope should have a clear directive that they aren't to be indexed. Orphaned pages earn low internal link equity in addition to the gateway page risk. So, if you're building a page that you want to rank well organically in search engines, it must remain manageable for both discoverability and authority reasons.

How to find an orphan?

You can identify and address any orphan pages on your site using a simple 5-step process:

Compile a comprehensive list of your current website's pages.

Because orphan pages are not linked to any domain page, pointing your favorite website audit solution to your home page and expecting it to identify orphan site pages won't work. The crawler will never discover them. Instead, you must provide the snail with a complete list of site URLs to examine. There are a few options for obtaining the URL list:

•Make good use of your sitemap.

The sitemap is a file usually located at the root of your domain to aid search engine bots in understanding your site's content, how frequently you update it, and how to best ground your content on search engine results pages, or SERPs. Your sitemap is dynamically updated when you add a new page or post to your Content Management System (CMS), but before you use this technique, make sure it contains the complete list of your pages.

•Obtain a list of website URLs.

If a sitemap isn't an option - for example, if the sitemap doesn't include the entire page list - you can generate the list using your CMS. Install a lightweight plugin like List URLs on WordPress, for example, to export a list of site URLs as a CSV file. You can also request a copy of the CMS log, which contains a list of all the pages served to your visitors. Filter the list by unique URLs after loading it into Excel. Scrutinize your website for pages with no inbound internal links. Set up an audit rule to catch pages that don't have at least one inbound internal link to identify orphan pages. Set up a recurring crawl while configuring the audit to see any new unlinked pages in the future. If you rely on a URL list, ensure you get an updated list from your CMS.

Examine the audit findings.

Log back into ContentIQ to see the results of your audit once it's finished. Determine which pages are orphans and their goals: Are they actively directing traffic to referral, paid, or social campaigns? Are their backlinks of good quality? Do site visitors use onsite searches to find them frequently? Assess traffic sources, visits, page views, and entry and exit behaviors using your web analytics solution. We can see an example of a campaign page that was used to help acquire traffic for a specific period in the example below. Resolve any orphan pages that have been discovered. Once you know what the orphan page's purpose is and how it helps you achieve your website and marketing goals, you can decide what action, if any, to take with it:

• If site visitors must find it browsing, link to it from other internal pages.

• If it's no longer needed, archive it.

• If it's serving a business need that doesn't necessitate internal linking to the page, leave it alone.

Rerun the audit regularly to catch any new unlinked pages. It's essential to regularly check the site for new issues because pages can become orphaned over time - either by adding new content and forgetting to link to it or accidentally removing links to pages nested deep in the site structure.

What to Do If You Come Across Orphan Pages?

Once you have your list of orphan pages, all you have to do now is figure out how much each one is worth:

  • Adopt a page if you want to keep it!

o Create an internal link from a page you know is already accessible to users and bots to your orphan page. Consider your users: where would this orphan page fit in naturally and provide value to them?

o Make sure your new page is included in your HTML and XML sitemaps.

  • Remove a page, and 301 redirect it if you don't want to keep it!

o If an orphan page has no value, duplicate content, or is otherwise unusable, you can delete it.

o Keep in mind that the orphan URL from this page should be redirected to the next most relevant page via a 301 redirect, as it may be accessible from an external source.

  • Noindex a page if you want to keep it orphaned!

o It's understandable if you have pages in your user journey that you don't want to be there. In that case, you only need to ensure your page has a clear noindex meta tag.

Verification

You should repeat the process once you have chosen and implemented one of the three options above for each orphan page. When comparing the two URL data sets, you should see that all your outlying pages have a noindex meta tag. If you still have pages that don't have this directive, select an option from the list above until all your pages have a permanent home. Finally, you should double-check that Google is aware of your efforts.

Note: If you're using the Yoast SEO plugin to manage your XML Sitemap, your newly adopted pages should be included automatically, so skip the next few steps. If you still need to set up Google Search Console for your WordPress site, Yoast provides specific instructions on how to do so when you use their plugin. For those who don't use the Yoast SEO plugin, open up the Screaming Frog SEO Spider once more so we can crawl our website and create a new XML sitemap.

1. Click Start after entering your website's URL. Select Sitemaps from the menu and then Create XML Sitemap once your crawl has reached 100%.

2. Some sitemap configuration options will appear. However, since the default XML sitemap export settings are correct and only include HTML pages in the 'internal' tab that receive a '200' OK response from the crawl, you can proceed to the next step.

3. Submit the XML sitemap to Google Search Console after you've saved and downloaded it. This will allow you to track the indexation of your pages and will also notify Google that you have pages you want to be indexed. That concludes our discussion.