Orphan Page
What is an Orphan Page?
An orphan page is a web page that has no incoming internal links on a website. The orphan page cannot be accessed from any place on a website but can be visited via an external backlink or direct URL.
Some pages are orphaned deliberately. Here’s an example:
How to use Competing Domains - this guide is hosted on our blog, but it can only be accessed from inside the tools at app.ahrefs.com. We did that on purpose, and there’s nothing wrong with this orphan page. We’ve even noindexed it because this page is not supposed to rank on Google.
Advertising landing pages can be another example of deliberate orphan pages.
Accidental orphan pages, however, require your attention. You must know how to find and fix them.
Most often, orphan pages are caused by mistakes in site migrations, navigation changes, site redesigns, out-of-stock products, and testing.
Why are orphan pages bad for your website?
1. They hurt discoverability and indexability
To discover new pages, Google uses three sources:
- internal links
- external links (backlinks) and
- sitemaps.
The search engine may never discover a page with no internal links and thus never display it in the search results.
The pages that you want to be indexed must always have at least one (better, a few) internal links on your website, even if you have a sitemap.
2. They can impose ranking problems
With no internal links, orphan pages aren’t getting any PageRank from the pages of the website. And Google still uses PageRank as one of the most important ranking signals.
Even if the orphan page somehow gets a bunch of quality backlinks from other websites, its link profile can still be improved with internal links.
How to find orphan pages?
Finding orphan pages is quite a tricky task. However, the process gets easier with Ahrefs Site Audit.
Create a new project in Site Audit for your domain and navigate to URL Sources tab. Here it’s essential to include all possible sources for URL discovery:
- Autodetected sitemaps: let Site Audit detect sitemaps and crawl them.
- List your sitemaps here if their location is not standard.
- List or import website URLs from other sources. These can include all pages exported from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Top Pages report from Site Explorer.
- This adds URLs of your website from the Ahrefs backlinks database.
Site Audit will crawl all the URLs that you provided and all other pages on the site and report Orphan Pages if any.
How to fix orphan pages?
A quick answer is as simple as “Link these pages from your website.”
Of course, some orphan pages can be intentional, and you don’t want to fix what’s not broken.
We’ve created this workflow chart that will help you deal with orphan pages:
