Nobody likes being left out in the cold, and that includes web pages! A web page is considered to be an “orphan” if no other pages on the site link to it. If you’ve been adding pages to your website, like new service or product pages, it is essential to include links to these pages on relevant existing pages, like category pages, the home page, or other service pages.
Orphan pages are an important issue to address because they are essentially hidden from both users and Google. If your pages are orphaned, users won’t be able to view these new pages through existing site navigation. Obviously, it is a very big problem if you are trying to sell services and products on pages that no one can access or see.
Additionally, Google’s crawl bots follow all of a site’s internal links in order to crawl the pages they link to and add those pages to the search results index. So, if a new page is added and there is no internal link to it, Google will have trouble crawling and indexing the new page, and it will indeed be left out in the cold void of the web instead of appearing in search results.
Fixing orphan pages is clearly important, but it can be easier said than done, especially if you have a large website, an e-commerce site, or you’ve had multiple third parties working on your website over a long time. From the technical SEO experts at Beyond Blue Media, here’s a quick guide to identifying and remedying orphan pages.
Novices or DIY marketers be warned: While there are a few relatively simple ways to address orphan pages, this is by nature a pretty technical fix, so if you ever feel out of your element, be sure to contact a marketing or SEO professional to avoid mistakes and get a thorough resolution.
How to Find Orphan Pages on a Website
Typically, identifying orphan pages is the responsibility of a company’s internal marketing specialist, a contractor, or an agency serving the business. While there are some free methods that anyone with site access can use to find orphan pages, these are generally very time-consuming and not worth the slog, especially for websites with hundreds of pages.
A simple (though not foolproof) check is to identify the most recent pages published to your site and make sure there are pages linking to them. Log into your website’s backend (usually involves logging into WordPress, Hubspot, Shopify, Wix, etc.), examine the list of published pages, and then check to see if you can get to those pages on your website front-end (the version users see).
To get a comprehensive list of the orphan pages on your site, you can use a range of licensable site auditor tools, including AhRefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog. Site audits are helpful for many reasons besides fixing orphan pages, so it is well worth it to license at least one of those tools or work with a contractor or agency that uses them. Ahrefs and Screaming Frog are a bit more technical in their setup and how they present site audit results, while Semrush offers a more straightforward version of them.
Here’s how orphan pages are identified in the Ahrefs site audit results:
Here’s how they look in Screaming Frog (some configuration required here):
And finally, here’s how Semrush’s site auditor lets you know about orphan pages:
In all three of these tools, you are able to click on the orphan results to find out which URLs are orphans as well as additional information that may help you resolve the problem. Again, all three of these tools require a paid license to operate, but in truth, regularly crawling your website with one of these tools is just best practice. You should typically crawl your site once a month, or more regularly, depending on how fast you publish new content.
To reiterate: site audits are a necessary part of digital marketing, because problems with your website will cause problems across the rest of your online marketing efforts. Always make sure that any agency, contractor, or internal marketing specialist is using site audits on a regular basis and correcting any issues that come up.
Fixing Orphan Pages
While discovering them might be a little time-consuming, fixing orphan pages is often as simple as adding a link to a new page in the website’s main nav menu, or adding a simple hyperlink to text on a service or category page. Ideally, your web developer should have established a solid URL hierarchy when the site was built, allowing you to easily see and sort the types of new pages you’ll be adding to the site. For example, a properly developed e-commerce website that sells shoes would have product pages nested under appropriate category pages, like brand, function, gender, and others. When you create a new product page for that site, it should be obvious that product pages for Nike shoes would be linked under the category “Nike,” that high heels are linked from the “women’s shoes” category, and so on.
That said, not all sites lend themselves to this obvious URL hierarchy, so if you aren’t sure which page to add a link to your orphan page, contact your marketing team or developer, as they will likely understand the site hierarchy better and know where it should go. The main point is that the issue gets addressed by adding internal links.
By now it might be clear that you can prevent orphan pages from becoming an issue at all with solid development and content production workflow. The site hierarchy should be relatively clear so it’s obvious where new pages need to be linked from, and it should always be the responsibility of the content publisher to make sure that page is linked to from somewhere on the site. By following those best practices and regularly crawling your website with professional audit tools, you can make sure none of your newborn web pages get left out in the cold.
Keep Fledgling URLs Aloft with Help from Beyond Blue Media
Not sure if you or your team are up to the challenge of sorting through orphaned content? At Beyond Blue Media, our experience, industry knowledge, and professional toolkit can tackle any kind of website issues you’d rather not think about. Contact the small business SEO experts at Beyond Blue Media today.
