How They Affect SEO (And How to Fix Them)

What Are Orphan Pages?

Orphan pages are webpages that don’t have links from anywhere else on your site.

Think of them like little islands, separate from the mainland of your website.

How Orphan Pages Affect SEO

Orphan pages can have unintended consequences for your site.

Three main issues can arise:

1. Page Does Not Get Indexed

Because there are no links to an orphan page, search engine crawlers have no paths to follow to reach it.

If they can’t reach the page, they can’t crawl or index it. And if they can’t index it, the page may not appear in search results.

However, search engine crawlers also reference your XML sitemap, which is a directory of all of the pages on your website.

So, in theory, the bot could still discover an orphan page through your sitemap even if you haven’t linked to that page elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an issue you should address.

Note: Sitemap crawling is also why orphaning a page isn’t an effective way to “hide” it from visitors or bots. More on that in the FAQ section.

2. Poor Search Rankings

Even if the page is crawled and indexed, having no internal links to a page can lower its rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and hurt your site’s organic search traffic.

Because of PageRank.

PageRank is a Google algorithm that uses inbound links as a ranking factor.

Think of each inbound link as a vote for that page’s quality and authority. The value passed by links is called “link equity.”

Building internal links is a...