How to Find and Fix An Orphan Page?
What is an Orphan Page?
An orphan page is one that exists on your website but isn’t linked to any other page. It’s due to this reason that users won’t be able to find them while browsing through your website as no other page links to it.
It’s not just the users who won’t be able to find the page. Even search engine crawlers won’t be able to crawl and index these pages as they won’t be able to find them in the first place.
This, in turn, would mean that you won’t be able to get any organic traffic on these pages as well. In a nutshell, you’d have wasted all your resources on developing that page for nothing.
How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages to Improve SEO?
Create a list of all your crawlable pages first
Before you can successfully locate your orphan pages, you’ll need to compile a list of the pages that are accessible from somewhere else on your website.
The best way to do this is to use an SEO crawler of your own.
Set it to crawl only the pages on your digital website that are also accessible to search engines — no pages that are affected by robots.txt commands, no-indexed, or otherwise deliberately hidden.
Then export the URLs your crawler returns into a spreadsheet or other document.
Search your site for duplicate pages
Duplicate pages are one common (but often overlooked) cause of orphan pages, meaning in cases where there’s more than one version of a page, only one is appropriately linked while the other one is an orphan.
First, check to make sure all the public pages on your website use either http or https consistently.
Then try entering all of the following versions of your homepage URL into your browser.
- https://www.yoursite.com
- http://www.yoursite.com
- https://yoursite.com
- http://yoursite.com
Ideally, all four of those takes on your homepage URL will redirect to the same place.
If they don’t, it’s a sign that you likely have the same issue on a page-by-page basis. Check a few of your other URLs using the same formula to see if that might be the case.
Use Google Analytics to investigate further
Naturally, any tool designed to help you with SEO will have some issues actually locating something like an orphan page, and Google Analytics is no exception.
However, it can be extremely helpful if you know what to look for.
If a page on your marketing website has ever been visited in any capacity and Google Analytics is active on it, the program will have a record of it.
Use the sidebar navigator to find “behavior flow” followed by “all pages.” Then sort the URLs by page views.
Single out your orphan pages
To figure out which of your potential orphans really are orphans, you’ll need to compare the URL list you compiled from Google Analytics to the previous list of crawlable URLs from your SEO crawler.
If there are only a few candidates to evaluate, you can do this individually, but if your site is very large, you may prefer letting a matching marketing tool go through them for you.
Address each of your orphans
No two orphans will be exactly alike, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that will work for all of yours.
Simply go through your list and assess each page by asking yourself questions like the following.
- Is this page actually necessary, or are you better off simply removing it?
- Is this page potentially a duplicate or nearly so? Is there a way to combine the relevant information from both copies?
- Is the page the target of a potentially valuable backlink from another external site?
- Is it ranking for any of your target keywords or key phrases?
- Is it optimized, or should it be optimized?
- Where do your valuable, keep-worthy orphans fit into the bigger picture of your sitemap, and how can you integrate them so that everything makes sense?
To reduce the likelihood of future orphans becoming an issue, be sure to use consistency regarding how you format your URLs.