An orphan page is a page known by search engines like Google but which is not linked from your internal linking structure. There are tons of reasons why you might have orphans and several ways to tackle them.
Orphan pages are a real SEO issue
As orphans are not linked from your structure, they don’t receive any internal popularity. If they don’t get any backlinks, chances are they can’t rank. If they are known to Google, they consume your crawl budget, and as you are not driving Googlebots to the right pages, this harms your SEO.
- Detect how many orphan pages your website has
- Determine how much of your crawl budget your orphans are consuming
- Spot if your orphans receive organic visits
All orphan pages are not born equal
Sometimes, you generated orphan pages just because a link node was broken on your website. With our Data Explorer you can easily locate the pain point. Oncrawl helps you answer the many questions you can ask about orphan pages:
- Do my orphans receive backlinks?
- Do they receive organic traffic?
- Do they rank?
Make better SEO decisions regarding your orphan pages
A good way to deal with orphan pages is to think about adding a “Disallow” rule in your robots.txt, use the Meta-Robots tag, setting up a 301 redirect or simply adding a link to your orphans. You can learn how to manage those rules and take action thanks to Oncrawl SEO Impact.
- Determine the best way to deal with orphans
- Take advantage of content from your orphan pages by analyzing crawl frequency
- Save on your crawl budget and earn better rankings
