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Orphan pages are website pages that have no internal links pointing to them. This makes them inaccessible through the site’s normal navigation, meaning they and search engines can’t find them by browsing or crawling your website.

However, users and search engines can still find them through external links or direct URL access. This means Google can still index them.

You can end up with orphan pages for lots of reasons, but the most common ones include:

• Poor internal linking: Forgetting to link new pages from existing content
• Site migrations: Losing pages during site moves (or any other URL changes without putting redirects in place)
• Deleted links: Removing internal links or pages that contained lots of them

For example, if you add a new product page but don’t link it from your main catalog, it becomes an orphan page.

What Counts as an Orphan Page?

Strictly speaking, orphan pages have ZERO internal links from anywhere on your site. Including homepage, blog roll, category, and navigational links.

However, pages that contain internal links, but only from other orphan pages, are still orphans for all intents and purposes.

While they have internal links pointing to them, they’re disconnected from the wider site structure. Users and search engines still wouldn’t be able to find them by following links from the homepage.

So, essentially, these are also orphan pages.

When Orphaned Pages Are Okay

You might leave some pages as orphans intentionally—and that’s okay.

These could be ad landing pages, exclusive offers for email subscribers, or private content you don’t want search engines or the public to find easily.

Can Google Index Orphan Pages?

Google can still index orphan pages if it finds them through your sitemap or external links.

But obviously you shouldn’t rely on sitemaps alone or other sites linking to yours to get Google to index your pages.

Why Orphan Pages Hurt Your SEO

Orphan pages hurt your SEO by making it harder for users and search engines to find your content. As a result, they can impact your rankings, traffic, and resources.

Poor Rankings

Search engines rely on links to find and index pages. With no internal links pointing to them, this makes it hard to find orphan pages. And if Google can’t find your orphan pages, it can’t index them and then rank them in search results.

Lower Organic Traffic

If your site ranks poorly in Google search results, it won’t attract much organic (unpaid) traffic.

Your click-through rate (or CTR) is tied largely to your ranking position:

Inaccessible Content

Users can’t find orphan pages through normal site navigation.

Wasted Crawl Budget

Having many orphan pages can also waste your crawl budget.

How to Identify Orphan Pages on Your Website

To fix orphan pages and prevent them from harming your SEO, you first need to find them.

Use a Site Audit Tool

Various SEO platforms offer some sort of site auditing tool.

For example, Semrush’s Site Audit tool crawls your website to find all your pages, just like Google would.

Run a Screaming Frog Crawl

Screaming Frog is a powerful SEO crawling tool that can tell you a lot about your website’s technical health.

Install a WordPress Plugin

If you’re using WordPress, there are a few plugins that can help you identify orphan pages and orphan posts.

One of the most popular free SEO plugins, Rankmath, can indicate which of your pages are orphans.

How to Fix Orphan Pages and Improve SEO

How you solve your orphan page issues depends on the reason you have the orphan page.

Method 1: Add Internal Links

Use case: The orphan page is valuable for users, or you can update it to make it useful.

Add internal links from relevant pages to these orphan pages.

Method 2: Merge and Redirect

Use case: The orphan page isn’t wholly valuable.

If the orphan page isn’t valuable on its own, consider merging it with another piece of relevant content.

Method 3: Use a “noindex” Tag

Use case: The page is useful, but you don’t want search engines to crawl and index it.

Method 4: Delete the Page

Use case: The page is not useful, gets no traffic, and has no backlinks.

Best Practices for Preventing Orphan Pages

Make Internal Linking a Habit

Develop a process for adding new content that includes internal linking as a key step in the content creation phase.

Track and Monitor Your Internal Linking Efforts

Create a spreadsheet of all your content. Have a column for the URL and a column for the number of internal links pointing to it.