What Are SEO Orphan Pages? How Do We Treat Them?

Orphan pages are pages that live outside of your website’s structure. They are indexable pages but they aren’t interlinked to your website that’s the only reason they are lost and called orphans. They can’t be accessed through your website because they are not interlinked from anywhere in your website and finding them is a very daunting task. These hidden pages from your website’s traffic can heavily impact your dubai SEO performance. In this blog, we’ll let you know how they affect your site, and most importantly, how you can find and fix them.

How Do They Affect Your Website?

Orphan pages have a very harsh effect on your website unintentionally from which these issues arise:

Low Ranking

Orphan pages do not get indexed but if it does by any chance, they will lower their ranking in SERPs because of a lack of internal linking and it will hurt your website’s organic traffic which means less visibility and traffic for your website.

Mostly Unindexed Pages

A website’s page needs internal links to get crawled by the search engine crawlers. They follow one link from another and that’s how your website’s pages get crawled and indexed. Orphan pages don’t have these internal links and that’s why they are most probably not indexed.

Bad User Experience

If a user finds an orphan page by entering the URL directly and lands in the most informative and great content and finds it very useful only to never find it again because that page isn’t linked to your website. Orphan pages create frustrating dead ends for users.

How To Fix Orphan Pages

All it takes to fix an orphan page is to add a link to it from another related page on your website. or, if suitable, from a navigation menu. Just watch out that you don't link from one orphan page to another.

It will become a part of your main site structure as long as it has a connection from another pertinent (non-orphan) page on your website. Issue resolved. The simple thing is that. The harder part is having to search through your website for orphan pages.

How To Find Orphan Pages

Finding orphan pages is an extremely difficult procedure. Because most dubai SEO tools and crawlers might not find the page if it is not linked to somewhere. You cannot recognize a page as an orphan if you are unable to find it.

This is a self-sustaining problem. In many ways, Site Audit searches your website similarly to how a search engine bot does. It finds new pages by navigating through each link in the page's code, starting with your homepage.

Site Audit can then collect more data if you have an XML sitemap and have linked your Google Analytics account. The sitemap's list of URLs and the pages that have drawn traffic will be compared.

Site Audit will label any disparities as "missing" and validate these pages as orphans if they show up on the sitemap but haven't received any traffic or vice versa.

Keep An Eye On Your Orphan Pages

It's critical to monitor your website closely to identify any newly orphaned pages. Maintaining regular monitoring ensures that your site is fully indexed and navigable. Here's how to manage orphan pages and maintain the integrity of your website:

1. Routine Site Audits

2. Keep an eye on your analytics data

3. Change management

4. Training your team to recognize and prevent orphan pages

5. Keep a record of all your pages and their intended link sources