What Is an Orphan Page? Is it Good or Bad for SEO?
What Is an Orphan Page? Is it Good or Bad for SEO?
Discovering pages that have no links is difficult, but not feasible.
If there are pages on your site that users and search engines can’t reach, this is a problem you have to fix.
These kinds of pages have a name: orphan pages.
In this post, you’ll realize what orphan pages are, why fixing them is significant for SEO, and how to discover each orphan page on your site.
What Is an Orphan Page?
A page with no links to it is called an orphan page.
Search Engines, similar to Google, usually find new pages in one of two ways:
- The crawler follows a link from another page.
- The crawler finds the URL listed in your XML sitemap.
So if you want Google to crawl and index your page, they need to be able to discover it.
Why Are Orphan Pages a SEO Issue?
Search engines can’t discover orphan pages through links, so orphan pages regularly go unindexed and never appear in search results.
Even your orphan pages are listed in your XML sitemap, they are still an issue for SEO.
Are Orphan Pages Bad?
Orphan pages aren’t good for either users or crawlers.
Users can’t arrive at those pages through your site’s normal structure so if there’s significant or helpful data on those pages, it’s wasted.
This can make a frustrating user experience.
With no inner links, no authority is passed to the pages, and web crawlers have no semantic or structural context in which to evaluate the page.
With no method of knowing where the page fits into your site as a whole, it can be harder to figure out which searches the page is important for.
Orphan vs. Dead End Pages
Let’s take a moment to quickly explain the difference between two SEO terms that can create confusion.
As we’ve just settled, an orphan page is a site page that isn’t linked to by, or reachable from, some other page on a same site.
A dead-end page, on other hand, is a page that doesn’t link to some other inner pages or any outer sites, thus making a “dead-end.”
When someone land on this page, they can either hit back or simply leave the site.
When search engine crawlers land on the page, they have no place to go, and no link value can be passed.
Today, with endless layouts and themes available, it’s harder to make a dead-end – but barely impossible.
A dead end can easily be cured by including links to your page content, or ensuring that sidebar or footer navigation is populated on each page.
All clear? Great.
We at CodeLedge, offer Sweden’s best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. If you are having any trouble with your marketing strategy, feel free to approach us at hi@codeledge.net or get a quote from here.
