Definition
An orphan page is a page no other page on your site links to, so crawlers and visitors can only reach it via a sitemap, external link or direct URL.
Orphan page explained
Orphan pages are common after redesigns, migrations and campaign launches. A landing page built for an ad campaign, a product removed from navigation but kept live, or blog posts dropped from category pages can all end up with no internal links.
Search engines may still find orphan pages through sitemaps or external links, but they receive no internal link authority and signal little importance, so they tend to rank poorly and be crawled rarely. Some orphans are also forgotten pages with outdated information that shouldn't be live at all.
To find them, compare the URLs found by a crawl of your site's links against the URLs in your sitemap, analytics landing pages and server logs. Anything that appears in those sources but not in the crawl is an orphan. Then decide for each one: link to it from relevant pages if it is valuable, redirect it if something better exists, or remove it.
Example
After a redesign, your detailed buying guides no longer appear in the navigation or blog index. They are still in the sitemap but have no internal links, and their rankings slide. Linking them from the relevant category pages turns them from orphan pages back into well-connected ones.
Why it matters
Valuable orphan pages are wasted assets. Linking them back into the site is a quick way to recover rankings they should have.
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Related terms
- Internal linkingInternal linking is linking between pages on your own site, which helps visitors navigate and helps search engines find pages and see how they relate.
- Crawl depthCrawl depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the homepage by following internal links.
- XML sitemapAn XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs you want search engines to crawl, with optional details such as when each page last changed.
- Site migrationA site migration is any major change to a website's platform, domain, URL structure or design that can affect how search engines crawl, index and rank it.