What is an orphan page?

Orphan pages are URLs that are not internally linked to another page. So, in order to be discovered and indexed by Google and other search engines, they need to know they exist and where. A website page can be discovered in two ways:

• The crawler discovers a page by following a link from another page;
• The crawler finds the URL listed in the XML sitemap.

Photo source: Seopressor.com

Why are the orphan pages bad for SEO?

The presence of an orphan page indicates that it can’t be found by either a user browsing or discovered by a search engine while crawling the internal link structure. So, if you have a page with great content but it isn't linked by another page of your site, there are 0 chances to be discovered by a user.

How to find orphan pages on a website?

• Get a full list with all your website’s pages;
• Run a website crawl and identify the pages with 0 inbound links;
• Link them to relevant internal pages.

What tools to use to identify orphan pages?

One of the best tools you can use to identify orphan pages is ScreamingFrog.

Another tool that will let you spot the orphan pages is Ahrefs.