Finding orphan pages on your own site takes about an hour

Aug 29
3 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Introduction

A page was built for a campaign two years ago, linked from an advert, and never added to the menu. The campaign ended, the advert stopped, and the page has sat there since — live, indexable, and connected to nothing.

Every site of any age has several of these. Some are worthless, but a surprising number are landing pages, service descriptions or articles that would perform well if anybody could reach them. Finding them is a mechanical exercise with a genuinely useful outcome.

1. Finding orphan pages means comparing two lists

The whole method in one sentence.

One list of every page that exists, and one list of every page reachable by following links from the home page. Anything in the first list and not the second is an orphan, and the comparison is arithmetic rather than judgement.

2. Build the list of everything that exists

Several sources, combined.

Your sitemap, your platform's page list, your analytics export and the index report in your search console each know about pages the others miss. Combining them and removing duplicates gives the most complete inventory you can assemble without a crawler.

3. Build the list of what is reachable

This is what a crawler does.

A site crawling tool started at your home page will follow every link and report what it found. Anything the crawler never reached, but which appears in your inventory, is disconnected from the rest of the site.

4. Check analytics for pages the crawler never saw

A shortcut that often works alone.

Export your landing pages for the last year and compare them with your navigation. Pages receiving visits that appear nowhere in your menus or content are usually orphans that search engines happen to still remember.

5. Decide whether each one deserves to exist

Not every orphan should be rescued.

Expired campaign pages, superseded services and old event listings can be redirected to something current. Pages describing work you still do, or answering questions people still ask, deserve to be brought back into the site properly.

6. Link the valuable ones from somewhere relevant

The fix is a link, not a rebuild.

Add a link from a related service page, an article on the subject, or the appropriate section of the menu. One or two contextual links from relevant pages does considerably more than adding it to a footer list.

7. Watch for pages orphaned by a redesign

The most common cause of a batch.

Rebuilding a site usually rebuilds the navigation, and pages not carried into the new menus are silently cut off while remaining live. A check for orphans belongs in the tasks that follow every redesign.

8. Remember that a sitemap entry is not a link

A frequent misunderstanding.

Listing a page in your sitemap helps it be discovered but does not connect it to your site or pass any importance to it. An orphan listed in a sitemap is still an orphan in every way that matters.

9. Make the check periodic

Orphans accumulate quietly.

Every new landing page, seasonal page and one-off asset is a candidate. A check twice a year takes an hour and prevents the situation where forty disconnected pages have to be triaged at once.

Note that some pages are orphaned deliberately, and that is fine. Thank-you pages, internal documents and paid landing pages you do not want in search results are supposed to be unlinked; they should simply be excluded from the report so they stop appearing as findings.

Conclusion

Compare a list of every page that exists against a list of every page reachable by following links, because the difference is your answer.

Assemble the inventory from your sitemap, platform, analytics and search console together, crawl from the home page to see what is actually reachable, use landing page data as a fast shortcut, decide individually whether each orphan deserves rescuing or redirecting, fix the valuable ones with contextual links rather than footer entries, check specifically after any redesign, remember that a sitemap entry is not a link, and repeat the check twice a year.