An orphan page is one that search engines may have difficulty discovering because they have no internal links from elsewhere on your website, they only have one link in the navigation menu.
These URLs and pages tend to get ignored and fall through the cracks because search engine crawlers, like GoogleBot, can only discover pages from the sitemap.xml or backlinks, and users can only get to the page if they know the specific URL.
What causes orphan pages?
Usually, orphan pages are not created with that purpose and instead occur for various reasons. The most common cause is not having processes for site migrations, navigation changes, site redesigns, out-of-stock products, testing, or dev pages. The effect of orphan pages on SEO
Orphan pages cause two main problems in SEO:
- Low rankings and traffic
- Wasted crawl budget
How to fix orphan pages: There are two kinds of orphan pages: – the expected kind and the unexpected kind.
Here are a few reasons for expected orphan pages:
- Pages linked on external websites, as redirects. Redirected pages are all orphans as internal links should always go directly to the correct page.
- Expired pages on a website with many pages with a short lifespan. They actually expire during the crawling time so it can become dangerous if they remain orphans for too long.
- Pages returning errors that have been corrected but that Google still crawls for a few moments.
On the other hand, orphan pages can also occur unintentionally and become an issue. For example:
- Pages that are only linked in the structure regarding navigation criterias (like category pages or internal search result pages). Those pages should always be linked to the structure if they generate organic traffic.
- Expired pages still returning content: some websites stop linking old content that has expired and do not deliver the right status code (like a 404 or a redirect to a newer version). The expired page is thus still available.
- Pages that have not been migrated correctly: there is no redirection and the old content is still available.
- Syntax errors during canonical tags creation. It creates wrong URLs (HTTP 200 or errors)
- Syntax errors during sitemaps creation. It creates wrong URLs that can deliver content and duplicates or return HTTP errors.