Where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is concerned, each aspect of your site is very important in as far as the ranking of your site in search engines such as Google is concerned. One often overlooked issue is orphan pages. These pages are pages within your site that are not referenced by any other page within your site thus they are in isolation of the rest of the pages within your site. But are orphan pages bad for SEO? The short answer is yes, and here’s why.

What are Orphan Pages?

Orphan page is a web page that lacks any inbound internal links to it. It implies that users or crawlers of the search engines cannot easily access these pages using the navigation structure of the site. Simply put, orphan pages are lost in cyberspace and there is no means of finding them by visitors or search engines.

To get a better picture of the influence of orphan pages, we shall dig deeper into effects and reasons why you should consider correcting.

Why Orphan Pages Matter for SEO

Reduced Crawlability by Search Engines

Bots (crawlers) are programs that search engines such as Google use to visit and index websites. Such bots use internal links to find new pages. In the case of an orphaned page, there are no internal links to it, so it is possible that the search engine crawlers will never know it exists. Unless the page is discovered, it cannot be indexed and unless it is indexed, it cannot rank on any search queries.

An example of this is that, say your web site is located in Sydney, Australia and you have a valuable page on your site that is about a specific local keyword (such as best electricians in Sydney), but that page is orphaned, then the Google crawlers might never come across it and thus it will never rank in searches about electricians in Sydney.

Loss of Link Equity

Internal links are not only routes through which crawlers follow, but also aids in the distribution of link equity (also referred to as link juice) throughout your site. Link equity refers to the value that a page transfers to other pages in the event of a linking between the pages. An orphaned page does not get any of the link equity, thus it may fail to get authority and rank highly in search engines.

Imagine that your Melbourne business services have an important landing page and this page is orphaned. Although it can be filled with useful content and keywords, it will not get any of the link equity of the other high-authority pages of the site, so it will be difficult to rank.

Poor User Experience

Although orphan pages are more of a technical SEO problem, they also form a bad user experience. The users depend on the clear navigation to locate the desired content. Orphaned pages are difficult to find, and this might lead to lost users and high bounce rates. Here in the case of an Australian web site, when your site is aimed at a large audience in the cities of Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, you want to make sure that all your pages are readily accessible to everyone.

Also, orphan pages tend to cause 404 errors or dead links, which is both frustrating to users and can make your site appear unprofessional.

How Do Orphan Pages Affect SEO?

Limited Indexation Potential

As it was stated above, orphan pages may greatly impair the possibility of a page to be indexed. The crawlers of Google require internal links to identify pages and without them your pages will be inaccessible to the search engine. As a result, orphan pages can hardly rank, regardless of the quality or optimization of the content.

Lower Search Engine Rankings

The unindexed pages lack the opportunity to rank on relevant keywords. SEO lives off of visibility and orphan pages by their very nature decrease the visibility. In case you desire to have a page in your site that targets such keywords as best roof repairs in Adelaide, then it must be accessible to the search engines, that is, it must be well linked in the site.

Furthermore, orphan pages may cause problems of content duplication or cannibalization of the rank of other pages in case there is no appropriate internal linking structure.

Wasted Content

When you invest time and resources in producing quality content and it becomes orphaned, then it is essentially a waste. Such pages are not discoverable, readable or sharable, so they do not provide any ROI on your investment. As an example, in an Australian e-commerce store, orphan pages may cause a loss of sales, where visitors in cities such as Sydney or Brisbane may never visit your product pages.

How to Identify Orphan Pages

The good news is that it is not difficult to find out which pages are orphan pages and there are a number of tools to assist you.

Here’s how you can identify orphan pages:

Google Search Console: Google offers a free tool that can assist you in tracking crawl information about your site. Identify those pages that have been indexed yet no inbound links. These are likely orphan pages.

Site Crawling Tool: A site crawling tool such as Screaming Frog or Ahrefs will allow you to crawl your entire site and display the pages that do not have any internal links to them. These tools will detect pages that do not form part of your site link structure.

Manual Review: In case your site is not so big, you can also do manual checking of your internal linking by browsing through content and navigation of your site.

Fixing Orphan Pages

After you have detected the orphan pages, then you should take the action to correct them. Here’s how:

Add Internal Links

The easiest and the most efficient way is to add internal links to orphaned pages. This may be achieved through the insertion of links in already existing content in other pages. To take an example, in case you have a page titled Emergency Plumbers in Perth, you can place a link to this page on your 24/7 Plumbing Services page so that it can be seen more easily.

Improve Navigation Structure

Make sure your website’s navigation is well-structured. The homepage or other key pages should have easy access to the pages that are vital to your business. In the case that you are located in Brisbane, make sure that such important pages as Home Cleaning Services in Brisbane are connected in the header, footer, or main navigation panel.

Remove Unnecessary Orphan Pages

In case the orphan page is obsolete, irrelevant or of no use, then you might as well delete it altogether in your site. It is also a good idea to redirect such pages to more worthy pages.

How to Avoid Orphan Pages in the Future

To make sure that orphan pages do not reappear, do the following best practices:

Site Audits: Audit your site regularly using such tools as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to find and correct orphan pages.

Good Content Planning: In the process of creating content, one should always consider how new pages should be linked. Every new page must have its purpose and must be referred to by other pages on your site.

Automated Link Monitoring: Turn to a tool that will automatically monitor broken or orphaned links, so that you can respond quickly before it is an issue.

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