You must have ever come across a page on your website that just doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. Thus, a page that won’t come up when you search for it can be harmful for your site. Your website most likely has “orphan pages”. These are the pages that have no links to them from other pages on your site.
Orphan pages can be harmful to your SEO performance because they are inaccessible to search engine crawlers and are not noticed by visitors. So, identifying and repairing any orphan pages on your website is critical.
In this article, we will tell you about an orphan page and you can explore common orphan page features, the impact of orphan pages on SEO, the most common causes of orphan pages and how to detect and fix orphan pages.
What should you know about orphan pages?
Orphan pages are those pages that can be indexed but lack internal links. Thus, this implies that there are no links to this page from any place on your site. So, the orphan pages exist outside of the site structure. The orphan pages cannot be visited from anywhere on your site unless they have internal links. Therefore, this makes finding these pages considerably more difficult, but not impossible.
There are two ways to view orphan pages. One way is through referrals, such as when another site links to it or when a newsletter refers to it. While another way is through organic search if the page ranks for specific keywords. Thus, some redirects are used when other URLs are routed to these pages.
Thus, they can be a huge problem for businesses because orphan pages cannot be identified through navigation. Therefore, it results in a bad user experience and lower search engine results. However, identifying and fixing orphan sites is critical for providing a better user experience and getting the most out of your B2B SEO efforts.
What are some drastic effects of orphan pages on your site?
Here are some of the major drastic effects that orphan pages can have on your site and damage the SEO. Let’s have a quick review of them:
Consume a large crawl budget
This is another important SEO issue with orphan pages and they might consume a large percentage of your crawl budget. Thus, the crawl budget is the number of resources that search engines devoted to crawling for indexing a certain website.
Poor website performance
Orphan pages are a major cause of websites failing to rank highly or receive the organic traffic they deserve. When search engine bots crawl on your website, they require a clear path from your main page to your other sites. Your orphan pages are essentially lost within the search engine’s index and do not receive good visibility.
Crawl rate
In addition to this, orphan pages also have an impact on Google’s crawl rate because crawling web pages are difficult to find. This may increase page load times, which will have a greater impact on your SEO.
Bad user experience
Orphan pages can degrade the user experience. They don’t do well in terms of user experience because they frequently have poor load times and fail to offer users a clear notion of what they’re trying to achieve.
How to fix orphan pages?
These are a few strategies that can help you to fix orphan pages. Let’s get to know about them.
Detect Orphan page
One method is to use Google Analytics for identifying all pages on your site. If you have a Google Analytics tracking code on your entire website, everything is logged when people visit any URL.
Restore orphan page
So, to make an orphan page visible and accessible, simply build an internal link to it from another page on your website. You may also do this by linking to the page from another website, but linking from within your own is the simplest and best for search engine indexing.
Resolving a spare orphan page
There are several approaches to dealing with an undesirable orphan page, which means you don’t want the page to exist. One possibility is to archive the page. In this situation, the page and its content are still accessible, but it is no longer part of the live site. Another option is to redirect the URL to a different place, preferably a relevant similar page. Users and search crawlers who come across it will be forwarded to the page you want them to see.
Use of sitemap
Sitemaps are a great approach to help search engine crawlers discover and index your websites. Thus, create and submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools if you don’t already have one.
Conclusion
In this section you have got to know about the orphan pages and the key factors behind orphan pages. So, now you know well how they affect user experience plus search engine rankings and the method to fix them.
