What orphaned pages are and how to fix them
An orphaned page is a page on your site that no other page links to. It might be in your sitemap, and it might even be indexed, but without internal links search engines treat it as unimportant and visitors can only find it by accident. Fixing orphaned pages is one of the quickest SEO wins on most WordPress sites.
Rilea SEO teamNovember 14, 20264 min read
Key takeaways
- An orphaned page has no internal links pointing to it from other pages on your site.
- Search engines find pages mainly by following links, and use internal links to judge how important a page is.
- Find orphaned pages with an SEO plugin report, or by comparing your sitemap with a crawl of your site.
- For each one, decide whether to link to it, merge it into a stronger page, redirect it or remove it.
- Prevent new orphans by adding links to every new post from at least one existing page.
What counts as an orphaned page
A page is orphaned when no other page on your site links to it. It isn't in your menus, it isn't linked from your posts, and it's often missing from category or tag listings too.
Orphaned pages are easy to create by accident:
- A new post that nothing else links to yet.
- A landing page built for an ad campaign.
- A page left behind after you changed your menu.
- Old posts that were only linked from a homepage feed and have since dropped off it.
- Pages created by plugins or imports that nobody linked to.
Why orphaned pages hurt SEO
Search engines find them late, or not at all. Search engines discover pages mainly by following links. A sitemap helps, but a page that's only in the sitemap gets crawled less often.
They look unimportant. Internal links tell search engines which pages matter. A page with no links pointing to it is, in effect, a page you've told search engines doesn't matter.
They get no context. The anchor text of links pointing to a page helps search engines understand its topic. Orphaned pages miss out on that.
Visitors can't reach them. If a page is useful, it's wasted when nobody can find it from the rest of your site.
How to find orphaned pages in WordPress
With Rilea SEO
Rilea SEO keeps an index of the links in your content. Go to Rilea SEO, then Link Insights, to see every published post, page and product with no internal links pointing to it. Your homepage is left out, because it doesn't need incoming links.
For each orphaned page, Rilea SEO suggests related pages you could add a link from, based on shared keyphrases and title words. Cornerstone content is ranked higher in the suggestions. If you've just installed the plugin, click Re-index all links first so it scans your existing content.
Rilea SEO counts links inside your content. Links in menus, sidebars and footers don't count, because those links appear on every page and say little about how pages relate. A page that's only in your menu will still show as orphaned, and it's worth adding contextual links to it.
Without a plugin
- Export the URLs in your XML sitemap.
- Crawl your site with a tool such as Screaming Frog, starting from the homepage.
- Compare the two lists. URLs that are in the sitemap but weren't found in the crawl are orphaned.
How to fix each one
Not every orphaned page deserves a link. Look at each one and choose one of four fixes.
| The page is | What to do |
|---|---|
| Useful and still accurate | Add internal links to it from related pages |
| Useful but thin or overlapping another page | Merge it into the stronger page, then 301 redirect it |
| Outdated, but has backlinks or traffic | Update it and link to it, or redirect it to the closest current page |
| No longer useful and has no links or traffic | Remove it, and leave it as a 404 or return a 410 |
Adding links that help
When you link to an orphaned page, link from pages that are genuinely related, and use anchor text that says what the page is about.
- Find two or three related posts. Rilea SEO's suggestions are a good starting point, or search your site for the page's main topic.
- Add a link in the body text where it naturally helps the reader.
- If the page belongs to a topic cluster, link to it from the cluster's cornerstone page as well.
- Check the page's category or tag pages list it, if you use them.
Our internal linking strategy explains how to plan topic clusters so every page has a place.
Stop new orphans from appearing
- Link every new post from at least one existing page on the day you publish it. Updating an older, related post is the quickest way.
- Use link suggestions while you write. Rilea SEO shows related content to link to in the editor.
- Keep cornerstone pages up to date, and add links to new supporting posts as you publish them.
- Check Link Insights monthly. It's part of a good WordPress SEO routine, along with reviewing your 404s.
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