Orphan pages are often a factor that can dampen your search engine optimization efforts. In this article, you will learn what it really is, how to find lost pages on your site, and why you should fix them to make your site perform better.
What are Orphan Pages?
Orphan pages (OP) are pages on your website that are not referenced by other web pages on your website. In other words, they cannot be accessed from any other page on your site.
And due to the fact that they are "left alone", orphan pages almost impossible to find, whether by users search engines or search engine spiders / crawlers that must index every web page on your site following your internal link structure.
Thus, nothing points to them or refers them to visitors to your site for reading or to search engines for crawling, indexing and ranking - in the first place, beyond the purpose of publishing the page itself.
In this article, you will learn more about orphan pages and how they differ from stub pages. In addition, you will become aware of how the OP can negatively affect your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, how to find and fix them.
Now, before we delve into what it is "Lost" pages, it is important to determine the difference between the "lost" page and dead end pagebecause most often OP confused with dead-end pages.
What is a stub page?
Dead end page (DEP) - this is webpagethat does not link to any internal page of your site or multiple external pages on different sites. Hence the term "dead end".
Unlike OP, To DEP can be accessed from different pages because they most likely have links pointing to them from other pages on or off your site (remember the OPs don't have many links pointing to them).
However, when people get to dead-end pages of your site, they are more likely to leave your site, which affects bounce rate... And when search engine spiders land on dead-end web pages, they have nowhere else to go, thereby not transmitting link mass or link "Weights" to other pages on your site.
So, as you could already see, dead-end web pages can help pages of lost websites by linking to the OP as long as they are relevant to each other - and lost web pages will not become dead-end pages if they contain links pointing to other pages of your site or other sites.
Why are orphan pages bad for SEO?
Orphan pages usually appear for the following reasons:
- Old web pages that were previously linked by different internal pages, but for some reason the links were removed and the old pages remained published.
- There are several problems with the architecture of your site.
- Your products are out of stock or out of order, but their product pages still exist.
- Your CMS has generated more unrecognized URLs for page templates and many other reasons.
More often than not, these causes create problems that interfere with your efforts to SEO to achieve the desired results.
While small numbers of OPs are typical and may not pose a major problem for concentrating all of your energy to scale, they nonetheless contribute to wasting your crawl budget and lead to index bloat.
In addition, other reasons that make orphan pages The bad ones for SEO are that they often lead to competing pages on your site and poor user experience, especially when your site visitors find outdated OPs through organic search.
Moreover, since search robots cannot find your OPs on other links, your orphan pageswill likely not be indexed or displayed on search engine result pages (SERPs) - this can be a problem, especially if you've spent a significant amount of time building a web page just to not get visibility in search.
How do I find orphan pages?
Your data Google analytics may be the best place to start looking for lost pages on your website, given that your web pages have Google analytics.
Start by getting a comprehensive list of URLs on your site - this can be done via the left sidebar of Google Analytics. Click "Behavior", Select"Site content" and press "All pages".
Now, since the OP is generally hard to find, it's safe to say that the number of times your have visited or viewed them. the target audience, is relatively small.
So, in your instrument Google analytics click "Page views"So the arrow points up and the tool displays a list Your site urls from least viewed to most viewed pages - by moving the OP to the top of the list.
To make sure your list is truly comprehensive, set the date range located in the top right corner of Google Analytics and set the date you started create your website... Then click the "Apply" button.
Then expand the list of URLs by clicking Show Lines in the lower right corner and select 5000 as the number of lines from the drop-down menu.
Of course, if you have more than 5000 web pagesyou will need to export them in batches until you get everything pageview data from Google analytics all over their website.
But since you will find orphan web pages from least to most viewed, your list will most likely include all OPs in multiple packages.
After all of your URLs have been loaded, click EXPORT in the top right corner of Google Analytics and select Google Sheets or any other file type you are comfortable exporting the list with.
After importing the URL data, it's time to look for the lost website pages.
Identifying lost web pages
To identify lost web pages on your site from an extensive list of URLs, create different columns in your table for "Crawled URLs" and "Google Analytics URLs" and compare the list using a formula that automatically checks if the URLs in the Google Analytics list match.
Typically, URLs from your Google Analytics list that are not on your crawl list are lost pages. So, create another sheet or column to categorize the lost website pages on your site that need fixing.
Also, here are other tools to help you collect a list of scanned pages your site:
- Google Search Console
- Raven's Tools
- SEMrush
- Moz Link Explorer
- Ahrefs
Now, if you don’t have the time and energy to go through all these resources and steps to find and fix your lost web pages, then you are highly advised to consult with SEO experts to audit your site. or go to the home page of my site and press ORDERING SERVICES.
How to fix an orphan page?
Fix the orphan page may be easier than you think. Plus, your decision should depend on the purpose of each lost page on your website and how it can help you achieve your marketing and conversion goals.
Here are your general resolution options:
Use other internal web pages on your website to link to your OPs, especially if it's important that your target audience visits the OP when navigating your site.
Archive lost pages when you no longer need them.
Let SEO specialists fix your lost pages.
Key findings
remember, that orphan website pages may not be a major issue you really need to worry about, but you shouldn't sit back and leave your web pages alone if you want to provide usability for your site visitors and allow search engines to crawl your site's most important pages.
So, when dealing with pages on orphan sites, pay attention to the following:
- Don't confuse orphan pages and dead-end pages.
- Eliminating the OP can improve your SEO.
- You can use Google Analytics to find orphan web pages.
- You can use other tools like Google Search Console, Raven Tools, SEMrush, Moz Link Explorer, and Ahrefs to identify the pages of your orphan website.
- How you fix a lost page will depend on its purpose for your site.
- It is best to leverage the expertise of SEO professionals when it comes to quickly finding and fixing OPs on your site.
