What Are Orphan Pages? (How to Find & Fix Them)

Orphan pages are website pages that have no internal links directing to them. As a result, they cannot be reached through the site’s regular navigation, making them invisible to both visitors and search engines when browsing or crawling your website.

That said, these pages can still be discovered via external links or by entering the URL directly. This means Google can still index them (more on that shortly).

Orphaned pages can occur for many reasons, but some of the most common include:

• Poor internal linking: Forgetting to link new pages from existing content.
• Site migrations: Losing pages during site moves or URL changes without setting up proper redirects.
• Deleted links: Removing internal links or deleting pages that contained many links.

For example, if you create a new product page but don’t link it from your main catalog, that page becomes an orphan.
Or consider two blog posts, Post A and Post B, where Post A links to Post B. If you delete Post A and it is the only page linking to Post B, then Post B could become an orphan page.

What Counts as an Orphan Page?

Strictly speaking, orphan pages are those with no internal links from anywhere on your site—including the homepage, blog roll, category pages, or navigation menus.

However, even if a page has internal links, but those links come only from other orphan pages, it’s still effectively an orphan.

For example, imagine you have two blog posts, B and C, which link to each other and are both linked from Post A. If Post A itself is an orphan page, then Posts B and C are also considered orphans, at least with the rest of your site.

Although these pages have internal links pointing to them, they remain disconnected from the broader site structure. This means users and search engines cannot discover them by navigating from the homepage or main site sections.

In other words, these pages function as orphan pages as well.

When Orphaned Pages Are Okay

Sometimes, leaving pages as orphans is intentional and perfectly fine.

These might include ad landing pages, exclusive offers meant only for email subscribers, or private content you don’t want easily found by search engines or the public.

For example, you typically wouldn’t link internally to a newsletter subscription confirmation page, so there’s no need to worry if that page is orphaned.

Can Google Index Orphan Pages?

Yes, Google can still index orphan pages if it discovers them through your sitemap or from external links.

For example, a user might access your orphan page by typing the URL directly (or the page may have only recently become an orphan). If they then share a link to that page, Google can follow it.

As a result, Google may choose to index the page, even without any internal links pointing to it.

Why Orphan Pages Hurt Your SEO

Orphan pages hurt your SEO by making it harder for users and search engines to find your content. As a result, they can impact your rankings, traffic, and resources. Let’s look at exactly how orphan pages might be holding your site back.

Poor Rankings

Search engines depend on links to discover and index pages. Without internal links pointing to them, orphan pages are difficult to find. If Google can’t find these pages, it won’t index or rank them in search results.

Even when Google does index an orphan page, it may rank poorly because it lacks internal links that pass authority and relevance signals.

Lower Organic Traffic

Pages that rank poorly on Google receive less organic (unpaid) traffic. Since your click-through rate (CTR) is closely tied to your ranking position, lower rankings usually mean fewer visitors. Orphan pages that don’t rank at all won’t generate any organic traffic.

Inaccessible Content

Orphan pages aren’t accessible through your site’s normal navigation, which negatively affects both your site’s performance and user experience.

For example, a helpful FAQ page that isn’t linked anywhere won’t assist your visitors. Similarly, a pricing page that users can only find by typing the URL directly is unlikely to improve your conversion rates.

Wasted Crawl Budget

Having many orphan pages can also waste your site’s crawl budget.

While a few orphaned pages might not cause major issues, hundreds or thousands of them can create significant problems.

For large sites, such as big eCommerce stores with thousands or millions of pages, keeping orphan pages under control is essential.

How to Identify Orphan Pages on Your Website

To fix orphan pages and prevent them from harming your SEO, you first need to find them.

But finding them reliably is a little tricky. After all, there are no links to them. And the main way search engines and crawling tools find pages is through links. That’s why knowing how to find orphan pages on a website is important.

So you sometimes have to get a little creative.

I’ve outlined a few of the best ways to find orphaned pages below.

Use a Site Audit Tool

Various SEO platforms offer some sort of site auditing tool. These work in a similar way to Google’s crawlers, so they can be a great way to highlight technical issues, like orphan pages.

They all work in slightly different ways.
For example, Semrush’s Site Audit tool crawls your website to find all your pages, just like Google would.

It then looks at your XML sitemap and compares the list of URLs in there with the ones that have received traffic.

The tool labels pages that have received traffic but aren’t in your sitemap (or vice versa) as orphans.

To use it to find orphan pages, set up a new project and enter your domain. Configure the crawl settings, or leave them as their defaults.

After running the audit, navigate to the “Issues” tab. Then search for “orphan”:

By clicking on these issues, you can view the affected pages. (You may need to connect your site to Google Analytics first.)

The tool might flag some pages that you don’t need to worry about, like URLs with parameters or old URLs that you have since redirected or deleted.

But working through this list can help you isolate your site’s orphan pages.

Run a Screaming Frog Crawl

Screaming Frog is a powerful SEO crawling tool that provides deep insights into your website’s technical health, making it an excellent choice for identifying orphan pages.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Open Screaming Frog and go to the crawl configuration screen.
2. Choose whether to let the tool automatically discover your sitemap or submit it manually.

Next, navigate to the API Access tab and connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts.
(This step is optional but highly recommended — integrating these tools helps Screaming Frog find more orphan pages by comparing crawled URLs with those found in your analytics and search data.)

• For Google Analytics, select the correct data stream for your site, then check “Crawl New URLs Discovered In Google Analytics 4” under the General tab.
• For Google Search Console, select the appropriate property, then check “Crawl New URLs Discovered In Google Search Console” under the Search Analytics tab.

Once set up, run your crawl. After it finishes, go to the Links tab and look at the Crawl Depth column. Crawl depth (also called click depth) measures how many clicks it takes to reach a URL from your homepage.

• URLs with a blank crawl depth are orphan pages — no internal links lead to them.
• Also ,pay attention to URLs with very high crawl depths.

As a rule of thumb, you want all pages to be reachable within 3 to 5 clicks from the homepage for better user experience and SEO.
(Exceptions might include paginated blog pages, category pages, or subcategories in large eCommerce sites.)

Why does this matter for orphan pages?

If a page only has one internal link buried deep—say, on page 130 of your blogroll—it could be 20+ clicks away from the homepage. Such pages are hard for both users and search engines to discover.

So while noting down your orphan pages, also keep track of pages that are very deep in your site structure—even if they do have some internal links.

Install a WordPress Plugin

This method isn’t as foolproof as some others, but if you’re using WordPress, some plugins can help you identify orphan pages and posts.

One popular free SEO plugin, Rank Math, can show which pages or posts are orphans. To check:

1. Go to the Posts or Pages section in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Look for the SEO Details column.
   (If you don’t see it, open the “Screen Options” dropdown at the top right, enable the column, and click “Apply.”)
3. In that column, you’ll see several icons—hover over them to see tooltips.
4. Look for the “Incoming Links” icon, and identify any pages or posts with a zero next to it.

These indicate content with zero incoming internal links—i.e., potential orphan pages.

A couple of caveats:

• Rank Math counts only in-content links, not navigational links or those in blog rolls. So some of these “orphans” might still be accessible via your homepage, blog roll, or category pages.
• You should still aim to build internal links beyond these core areas to improve SEO and user experience.

Another important point:

Manually scanning through many posts or pages can be time-consuming. It might be manageable if you have a hundred or so, but for thousands of pages, this approach isn’t practical.

If you have the Pro version of Rank Math, there’s a handy orphan pages filter that makes this process much easier. This makes it a viable option for larger sites, though it isn’t free.

How to Fix Orphan Pages and Improve SEO

1. Add Internal Links: Integrate links to orphan pages within your existing content, menus, or footer. Choose relevant anchor text that fits naturally.
2. Update Navigation and Sitemaps: Include important orphan pages in your site navigation and XML sitemap to make them discoverable for both users and search engines.
3. Create Related Content Links: Link to orphan pages from related blog posts, articles, or category pages to improve content flow and user engagement.
4. Use Breadcrumbs: Implement breadcrumb navigation to help users and search engines understand the page’s location within your site hierarchy.
5. Remove or Consolidate Low-Value Orphan Pages: If the orphan pages contain outdated or low-quality content, consider removing them or merging the content with more relevant pages.

Best Practices for Preventing Orphan Pages

Finding and fixing orphan pages can be tough, so ideally you want to avoid having any in the first place.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to prevent orphan pages. Just follow these best practices:

Make Internal Linking a Habit

Create a routine where adding internal links becomes a natural part of your content creation process—whether you’re writing the content yourself or managing a team of writers and editors.

By including internal links from the very start when new content is created, you proactively build a strong internal linking structure instead of scrambling later to add links across hundreds or even thousands of existing posts.

That said, it can be challenging for new writers to familiarize themselves with all the existing content to know what to link to—something we’ve experienced at Backlinko.

To help with this, we encourage new writers to use a simple site search technique to quickly find relevant pages to link:

1. Think of a few keywords related to the content you’re writing.
2. In Google, type the following search query:
   site:yourdomain.com “keyword(s)”

For example, if one of our writers was working on an article on social media marketing, they might type “site:backlinko.com social media” into Google.

Like this:

This gives them a bunch of articles and pages that they could link to within that post about social media.

This is a handy “hack” for finding relevant articles to link to. But in the context of eliminating and preventing orphan pages, you need a more precise approach.

Track and Monitor Your Internal Linking Efforts

A simple way to stay on top of orphan pages is by maintaining a spreadsheet listing all your content. Include columns for the URL and the number of internal links pointing to each page.

How you collect this data depends on the tools you’re using:

• If you’re on WordPress, plugins like Rank Math (as mentioned earlier) can help, though this method is more manual and better suited for smaller sites
• If you use Screaming Frog, check the “Inlinks” column in the “Links” tab to see how many internal links each page has. You can export this data to easily compile your spreadsheet.

Regularly updating and reviewing this will help you identify and fix orphan pages before they become a bigger SEO problem.

Avoid Orphan Pages with SEO Best Practices

Orphan pages can impact your SEO and your user experience. Both of these can have an impact on your rankings, traffic, and conversions. So you definitely want to avoid having any orphan pages on your site.

Want to learn more about boosting your site’s SEO for better performance? Engage Coders offers the best SEO services in the USA to help you achieve your goals. Contact us today!