How to find orphan pages on a website

An orphan page is a page on your site that no other page links to. SEO by Zaweba finds them by crawling your site, reading your XML sitemaps and building the internal link graph, then listing every page that turns up in the sitemap but has no internal links pointing at it. It also lists the opposite problem: pages your site links to that are missing from the sitemap.

Both lists come from the site crawler, which runs as part of the guided audit when you ask it to crawl your own site.

Why orphans matter

Search engines mostly find and weigh pages through links. A page that nothing links to can still be found through a sitemap, but it gets no internal support, and visitors can't reach it by clicking around. Orphans usually appear when a menu is changed, an old campaign page is left behind, or a product drops out of a category without being removed.

Running the crawl

In step 4 of the audit, alongside the crawl of the top results, you can choose to crawl your own site. The crawler reads robots.txt first, using Google's matching rules, then reads your XML sitemaps (including sitemap indexes and gzip files). It crawls breadth first up to the page limit, which is 500 pages for your own site by default and can be changed in Settings under Limits.

As it goes, it records each page's inbound links, its click depth from the start and the anchor text used to reach it. That is the internal link graph, and it is what makes the orphan list possible: a page in the sitemap that the crawl never reached through a link has nothing pointing at it.

Reading the lists

Open the Site pages tab on the dashboard after the scan. Orphan pages and pages linked but not in the sitemap are among the site problems it reports, together with duplicate titles, thin pages, canonical conflicts, redirect chains and error pages. The site checks come with link suggestions, which help with the obvious next step of deciding where an orphan should be linked from.

If your site is bigger than the page limit, raise the limit before you trust the orphan list. A page that the crawl simply didn't reach in time is not the same as an orphan, and a small limit on a big site will make the list look worse than it is.

Fixing them

For each orphan, decide whether it should exist. If it should, link to it from a relevant page, ideally one with plenty of inbound links of its own, using anchor text that describes it. If it shouldn't, remove it from the sitemap and deal with the page itself, perhaps by redirecting it to its closest replacement.

For pages linked but not in the sitemap, the fix is usually to add them, unless they are pages you don't want indexed. A noindexed page that sits in the sitemap is flagged as a separate problem, so the two lists keep each other honest.

You can export the Site pages table with File, Export table as CSV if you want to work through it in a spreadsheet. Run the audit again once you've made the changes; the History page keeps every scan, so you can compare the two and see which problems are fixed.