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Crawling & crawl budget

Orphan page

Also known as: orphan URL, orphaned page

An orphan page is a URL on a website that no other page of the same site links to. It loads when someone enters the address, but it does not appear in the navigation or in any internal link.

Why do orphan pages matter for SEO?

Google uses links to find new pages to crawl. Its documentation says that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. Without an internal link, a page can only be discovered through a sitemap or an external link. A page without internal links also gets no signal about how it relates to the rest of the site (assessment).

Common causes are relaunches and migrations with incomplete link mapping, menu items that were removed, and products taken out of a category while the URL stays live.

Site architecture and click depthTree of a website: the home page is at depth 0, categories A and B at depth 1, three subcategories at depth 2, three products at depth 3. Product 1 is reached via the home page, category A and subcategory A1, and its breadcrumb shows that path. On the right is an orphan page that no internal page links to.Depth0Depth1Depth2Depth3Home pageCategory ACategory BSubcat. A1Subcat. A2Subcat. B1Product 1Product 2Product 3no linksOrphan pageno link points hereBreadcrumb on Product 1Home page › Category A › Subcat. A1 › Product 1Click depth = number of links from the home page. Google finds pages mainly through links.
Each level sits one click further from the home page. Google finds pages mainly through links and recommends that every page you care about gets a link from at least one other page on the site. The breadcrumb shows the page’s position in the hierarchy. Sources: Google Search Central: Link best practices for Google; Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide; Google Search Central: Breadcrumb (BreadcrumbList) structured data.

How do you find orphan pages?

A crawler follows links, so it cannot find a page that has none. The usual method is to compare two lists. One list contains URLs from sources that do not depend on internal links, such as the XML sitemap, server logs, analytics or Search Console. The other contains the URLs the crawler reached through internal links. URLs that appear only in the first list are orphan pages.

Example

After a relaunch, a product page is removed from its category listing but remains in the XML sitemap. No internal link points to it anymore, so it is an orphan page.

Some orphan pages are intentional, for example order confirmation pages or campaign landing pages that are shared only by direct link.

Sources

  1. Link best practices for Google – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
  2. How Google Search works – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com

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