What are Orphan Pages?

It is very important that all pages on our website are linked to each other. If we have a web page that has no links, Google will have a hard time getting to that page. Internal linking establishes links between internal pages and helps a lot in distributing the authority power of your web pages.

Unfortunately, if you have a web page that does not receive any links on the site, it will be difficult to be noticed by Google. For this reason, we should find orphan pages and give internal links to those pages.

What are Orphan Pages?

Orphan pages are the name given to the pages on your website that do not receive any internal links. If there are pages that have never received internal links between your web pages, they are orphan pages. These pages are difficult to find by Google and other search engines.

What are the harms of orphan pages in terms of SEO?

Orphan pages are not easily found by Google and other search engines. In such a case, they cannot be indexed either. It is also difficult for users who enter our website other than Google to access such pages.

If we want to increase our organic traffic, we need to present the relevant content to users when a query is searched by Google. However, since orphan pages cannot be found and indexed by Google, those pages will not receive traffic.

If we want to extend the average session duration, we need to keep the user on our website as much as possible. We can do this knowing that each of our necessary pages is indexed and that the pages on our website are linked. However, users will not be able to access orphan pages because internal links are not provided for users.

What Can Be Done Against Orphan Pages Problem?

There are 2 basic things you can do against orphan pages. First, orphan pages can be detected and added to the sitemap.xml file. The second is to make internal linking for each of your web pages. However, remember that orphan pages are harmful to overall SEO, even if they are in your sitemap. For this reason, it is the healthiest thing to have both in the sitemap and internal linking.