How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages for Website SEO

When researching an old website’s SEO history, one may come across several outdated pages with broken links and irrelevant content that can frustrate users and damage your site's SEO. They negatively impact the user experience, so these pages need to be fixed ASAP as they are potentially harming your site's search engine rankings. In the SEO world, these pages are commonly referred to as orphan pages.

Orphan pages are often overlooked, and they are one of the driving forces for the decline in your site’s SEO health. What really is an orphan page? Are orphan pages okay for your website? Read this blog to find out answers about it.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What are orphan pages?
• Causes of orphan pages
• Are orphan pages bad for SEO?
• What are the best ways to fix orphan pages?
• How to protect your site from orphan pages?

What are orphan pages?

Orphan pages are web pages that are not linked to any other page on a website. This means that users and search engine crawlers cannot access these pages unless they have the exact URL.

Example of an Orphan Page

It’s like a ship, lost in the ocean with no destination. They are hard to locate, and once you find them, it does not take you anywhere due to broken links.

Think about the website pages as books in a library. Some books may barely get checked out because they're not on the right shelves. So in order to get to those books, you have to first find them, which is quite a challenging task, and then put them in the right catalouge. Similarly, on a website, orphan pages are hard to find and access unless they're properly linked and integrated into your site's structure.

Because they are accidentally created, the main question arises that where do they come from? What causes orphan pages? Let’s find out.

Causes of orphan pages

Orphan pages usually develop by chance due to various reasons. One must pay close attention towards these when making any updates to their site.

1. Site Migrations & Redesigns

Sometimes during a redesign or migration, pages may get removed or moved without updating internal links. This can lead to the creation of orphaned pages that are no longer linked to the main site structure.

2. Poor site structure

If your site’s structure is poorly organized, such as a confusing navigation menu, complex sitemap, duplicate content, and broken links, then there is a higher chance of orphan pages being created.

3. Modifying Page URLs

Another common reason for pages to become orphaned is due to changes in page URLs. If you make any changes in the URL, any existing links to the old URL will become broken, and because of that an orphan page will be created.

4. Testing pages

For testing purposes, developers often create sample pages during development. Sometimes they might blunder by not properly integrating them on the main website and forget to remove them after intended use.

5. CMS plugin issues

There are content management systems available in the market like Wordpress which offer many useful plugins. Certain plugins may sometimes automatically create pages, such as those for forms, portfolios, or custom post types, but they often fail to integrate these pages into the website's existing internal linking structure. Because of these technical issues and bugs, pages get isolated and become orphaned.

Are Orphan Pages Bad For SEO?

Search engines like Google depend on internal links to crawl and index web pages effectively. When a page gets orphaned, it becomes nearly invisible to search engines and most of the time they are left out, because of that the chances of them to appear in search results are diminished.

While a sitemap can help search engine crawlers find orphaned pages, it does not ensure indexing. These pages may still require other SEO factors, like backlinks or regular content updates, to be considered important and relevant. You can read more about how orphan pages can be indexed and managed effectively by clicking here.

What Are The Best Ways to Fix Orphan Pages?

Before we learn about the ways to fix those orphan pages, let us first find out about the process of finding those pages. 

Tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush can help you find these pages by crawling through your site, making notes of the list of URLs that were included in your sitemap, and comparing them. Any differences may indicate orphaned pages.

Now that you've found those lost pages on your website, the next thing you might be wondering is how to fix orphan pages. Here are some of the best ways to do that:

1. Insert links to Orphan Pages

The simplest way to bring orphan pages back to life is to link them with the relevant part of your site. You can add them to your site’s footer, and navigation bar or try to fit them into your page’s related content.

2. Delete or Merge Pages

It might be possible that your orphan page contains information that is similar to other pages on your site. So you can either merge them with the more similar relevant page or delete them entirely if they are irrelevant and no longer valuable. Merging orphaned content with relevant pages also improves its SEO rankings because of more content and keywords.

3. 301 Redirects

If an orphan page is outdated or irrelevant, consider using a 301 redirect to direct users and search engines to a more relevant page. This ensures that the link equity is preserved and users find useful content.

How To Protect Your Site From Orphan Pages?

Do Regular Site Audits

Schedule routine audits using your preferred tool. These tools might help you identify orphan pages from your site easily. Make it a monthly SEO habit to look for and resolve these issues.

Also, keep an eye on your analytical data. Look for pages that get direct traffic but no referrals from other pages on your website. Such pages are strong indications of orphan pages that are viewed directly or through other connections.

Improve Your Website’s Structure

The best way to prevent your site from orphan pages is to make your site’s structure well organized. Work on the navigation menus, try to make it simple and direct; remove any duplicate content or merge it where it is relevant; and use a hierarchical structure where every page is linked with some other relevant page.

Updating Internal Links

Update internal links when you make any changes to your website. This helps in keeping your website's structure maintained and makes it easier for people and search engines to find them. When you update or add new content, make sure all the pages that go together are linked properly.

Correctly Handle Discontinued Products

If you run an online store, it’s important to properly remove products that are no longer available. Set a status code of 404 or 410 to show that the product is gone. Not removing links to old products is a common reason for orphan links. Try reaching out to RUN Marketing if you are looking for ecommerce SEO services in Toronto. 

Reach Out to Run Marketing

For more details or to optimize your orphan pages, contact RUN Marketing, a top digital marketing agency in Mississauga. We offer the best SEO services in Canada, our services are focused on educating various types of enterprises, such as dental marketing, marketing for therapists, and Amazon e-commerce.