Orphan pages represent a silent but significant obstacle to a website’s ranking. Without proper internal linking, these pages remain isolated and undiscoverable by bots, affecting both SEO and user experience.
Identifying these types of pages is crucial to avoid impacting the visibility of the entire content on a website and to be able to correctly transfer authority between pages. In this article, we explore what these pages are, how they affect search engine rankings , and what steps you can take to detect and fix them.
What is an orphan page
An orphan page is one that has no internal links connecting it to other pages on the same website, which leaves it completely isolated. This situation makes it difficult for both users and search engines to find it.
Search engines discover the contents of a website by following internal links. Without them, the process of crawling and indexing a page becomes complicated and there is no guarantee that it will be indexed.
An orphan page may be included in the results pages of Google or another search engine, since there may be signals of its existence, such as being listed in its sitemap.xml or having been linked from other pages in the past. Not having internal links significantly reduces its visibility and transfer of authority, impacting its organic positioning .
In short, orphan pages are an obstacle to achieving an optimal user saudi arabia email list experience and a correct internal linking SEO strategy.
Orphan pages arise for a number of reasons on a website.
Link removal without replacement : When modifying components or texts on a website, pages are often left unlinked. When the link that previously linked to a specific page no longer exists, the result is an orphan page that is not called from anywhere.
Changes in web architecture : Updating the structure of a site without cross-referencing the previous content and where it is being linked from causes disconnections between pages and, therefore, orphan pages.
Website migrations : During this process, some pages may not be moved properly - at the content, links, components level -, generating forgotten pages that respond with a 200 success code, but are not called from any internal page.
Worthless pages created by plugins, development or CMS functionalities : It is very common to see pages in the Google index that are completely unknown to the owners of a website and that they do not know where they are generated from and that, certainly, are not linked from anywhere. We have seen many of these cases that may be the result of the plugins themselves or unknown CMS functionalities, as well as pages that are created so that a component works.
Old content : Over time, certain content loses its internal links due to updates and changes in the site structure. This can be a lost opportunity for the correct and efficient transfer of authority to the pages that we really want to rank.
Careful management of internal links is essential to keep your site structure SEO friendly and avoid these problematic pages.
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