Search and SEO
What is Orphan page?
An orphan page is one that no other page on the site links to. It can still be crawled if it appears in a sitemap, but it receives no internal authority and reads as unimportant — which is usually how the search engine treats it.
Also called: orphaned content
How pages become orphans
- A section is removed from navigation but the pages remain
- Landing pages built for a campaign and never linked afterwards
- Old blog posts that fell off pagination
- Programmatically generated pages nobody wired into the site
Finding them
Crawl the site starting from the home page, then compare that list against your sitemap and your server logs. Anything in the sitemap that the crawl never reached is an orphan.
The check is cheap enough to automate. On this site the build fails if any indexable page has no inbound internal link.
Fixing them
Either link the page properly from somewhere relevant, or accept that nothing needs it and remove it. Leaving an orphan in the sitemap is the worst of both: it is crawled, judged, and counted against site quality without ever being useful.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this properly — 4 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.