What is Orphan Pages and How to Identify in Your Website

Hey there! We are back with another blog post. In the previous blog, we have discussed the internal linking and how you can find and fix broken internal links. So, today, we are going to learn about the orphan pages. Now, you may ask why do our blog posts revolve around internal linking for SEO? Well, internal links are an important part of the SEO that you can use to increase the overall website spending time, ranking and traffic. Therefore, it is important to maintain your internal links by finding and fixing broken links and orphan pages. In the previous blog, we have covered broken links and this one below will be focused on orphan pages. 

What are Orphan Pages?

In the SEO term ‘orphan pages’ refers to the internal pages or links that are not linked from any page of a website. Since these pages are not linked at all the search engine bots cannot crawl and index them. In other words, the pages fall into the crack. The effect? You will miss a great opportunity to engage new customers through your pages.

How to Identify and Fix Orphan Pages?

There are various ways to identify orphan pages in a website but to make things easier we have prepared a step-by-step process to identify and resolve orphan pages.

First step: Prepare a list of all current web pages

As mentioned earlier orphan pages are not linked from any page so, it will be quite difficult to identify them. So, the crawler cannot help you here. Instead of the crawler, you have to prepare a list of site URLs. There are several ways to do this.

Take help from the sitemap

You sitemap contains the list of URLs you place at the root of the domain to help search engine bots to understand the content of your website. So, you can collect all page URLs from the sitemap but make sure your sitemap is updated before initiating with this technique.

Second step: Run the crawl to find pages with zero inbound links

You can also set up side audit to identify the pages that do not have any inbound links. While running the audit set up recurring crawl to find any issue in the near future.

Note: if you are relying on the site URLs then get the updated one from your website CMS.

Third step: Gather the audit result

Once you are done with the audit gather the result to analyse the list of orphan pages. Find out about the pages like what is their objective? Do they have any quality backlinks? Can visitor access them through search engine results?

Fourth step: Resolve the orphan pages

• You can choose from the following steps to aid them:
• You can link them to another internal page if it is crucial to find it through browsing.
• You can archive them if they are not necessary
• Leave it like it is if it doesn’t require page linking.

Once you have found out what is the actual purpose of your orphan pages it is time to resolve them. 

In case if you need help with your internal page then, you can hire services for search engine optimization from Qdexi Technology at an affordable price.