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Landing pages often include a lot of bugs and mistakes while creating a website. Some look trivial at first, such as misspelled words or punctuation, and are simple to correct. Some are more significant and have the potential to harm your SEO plan and reach. One such instance on your website might be an orphan page.
An orphan page is a page on your website that has no links to other pages or websites. It might not seem like a big concern if your website has one orphan page. But because there aren’t frequent website audits and content upgrades, they build up over time. These sites spend your crawling money in addition to doing nothing but taking up space on your website and generating no traffic or value. Additionally, they mislead users and worsen the user experience on your website.
Pages on a website that inadvertently lack both internal and external links are known as orphan pages. Consequently, neither search engine crawlers nor end users can access these pages. This broken or abandoned page does nothing for your website or company; it only takes up space on your sitemap and does no good. A user is forced to type the URL into the search bar in order to view an orphan page.
Take care not to mistake a dead page for an orphaned one. A dead page forces the user to hit the return button or exit the website because it does not take them any farther.
But unlike an orphaned page, there are connections on the website that take users to dead pages. Consider the “Find a store” page of a tiny online retailer that lists all of the locations in your city. You are limited to viewing the URLs on the page; you are unable to take any further action. Here’s an illustration of a dead page. However, if the online retailer has a page promoting a winter deal that they neglect to delete, it will still be there long after all of the links to it are taken down for the upcoming season. An illustration of an orphaned page is this one.
Orphan pages are a waste of several website traffic opportunities because a basic search will not show them. Now let’s explore the three main effects of orphan pages.
A search engine crawler finds no way to find the page because it is not linked to. They also cannot index it if the crawler is unable to reach it. Consequently, the search engine neglects a whole page on your website. Your search rankings are still negatively impacted even when, in principle, the crawler uses your sitemap to find the orphan page.
Even after sitemap crawling, SERPs will typically devalue a page on your website if it has no internal page links. PageRank, a Google algorithm that assesses inbound links to determine SERP rankings, is to blame for this. Consider each inbound link as a vote for the legitimacy or excellence of a webpage. Increasing the number of internal links on each page of your website is an excellent method to increase link equity because each link contributes to its own worth. By this measure, orphaned pages have little to no link equity, which lowers their search engine ranking and generates little to no organic traffic.
An orphan page is almost invisible to the end user. Imagine your customer visited a promotional landing page six months ago, and wishes to revisit the page. If you’ve removed all the inbound links to that page, the only way to find it would be through their search suggestions and history. Now imagine you orphan that promotional page even before anyone can visit. You’re losing out on traffic and giving competitors a chance to surpass you.
When you regularly update your website without conducting a site audit or you change content without reviewing the hyperlinked pages, you’re more likely to have a higher orphan page count on your website. Is there a way to fix this?
Having one or more orphan pages on your website has no benefits. Over time, owners of businesses and websites come to understand that the costs associated with maintaining orphan pages outweigh the benefits. There are various methods available, courtesy of SEO specialists, to detect orphan pages on your website.
The URL location of any file, page, and video that is connected to your website can be found in the XML sitemap for your website. Even though orphaned sites don’t have any direct incoming connections, you can still retrieve the URL if you can see them on the sitemap. Typing it is the simplest way to locate it.
sitemap.xml at nameofyourwebsite.domainname.
Use of a web crawler tool will be necessary to obtain an extensive list of all orphaned pages on your website. These days, Scrapy, Semrush, and Screaming Frog are among the best web crawlers. For orphan pages, the majority of them feature a special area. Before you begin, make sure you are connected to both Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You can acquire expert help on unexpected aspects and streamline the process by consulting an SEO specialist.
An alternative approach needs you to export a list of every URL on your website and use your server’s log files to cross-reference them. Orphan pages won’t appear in the crawl data, but they will appear in your logs. This will assist you in determining which pages require correction.
You will get an indexable URL list for your website that contains the names of all orphan links once you have finished identifying the orphan pages on your website. The value the page offers to your website will dictate what you do next. One quick cure might be to share the page on social media or other platforms to increase traffic to it. Make sure your orphaned page’s SEO is optimized because if it stays on your sitemap, there’s a chance Google will find it.
In light of this, there are three things you could do next:
Unsure about which action to take? Here are a few questions you can ask first:
It is preferable to prevent than to cure. Ideally, you should perform regular site audits and ensure that all of your websites have inbound connections. This guarantees that, particularly following a content overhaul, you do not inadvertently orphan any pages.
Perhaps you should combine older posts with pertinent pages from across your website, rather than getting rid of them completely. Create 301 redirects that point to comparable pages from the URLs you intend to delete from your website. This will guarantee that the pages on your domain don’t become isolated.
Select an industry-leading clientele and a proven track record of success when looking for an SEO professional for a systematic approach to SEO strategy and website optimization. Reach out to us right now.
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