Orphan pages are the web pages which are not linked to any other web page of the specific site and thus remain ‘hidden’ from the search engines and other users. This can also lead to expensive mistakes as opportunities to engage the people and convert them are lost.
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Thus, in this article, we will continue the discussion of approaches to finding orphan pages within your website and its tendencies, as well as practical actions to apply to the utilization of orphan pages within the framework of your SEO strategy. To tackle these hidden factors, you have to improve the framework of your website, deliver the best experience to the users, and obtain a better rank in the search engine.
What Exactly are Orphan Pages in SEO?
Orphan pages in SEO have to do with the web pages that do not have linking from related pages in the same website. This poor internal linking not only prevents these pages from being easily indexed by search engines but such kind of design also makes it very difficult for users to locate the wanted information with its webpage.
Specifically, orphan pages do not have links to them from other pages, which means they can be ‘forgotten’ in terms of indexing resulting in their relegation to the lower chances of attracting organic traffic.
One of the important things that needs to be established for improving the website is the identification of orphan pages. They can contain useful content which has not been enough promotion, for instance, blogs, pages of a certain product or service.
How to Find Orphan Pages on Your Website?
Find All Crawlable URLs
The initial process to undergo in order to find orphan pages is to establish all the potential URLs that can be crawled on the particular website. It also helps to prepare a list of pages that should be reachable using internal links.
Use a Web Crawler Tool: There are many crawling software options available in the market but Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or DeepCrawl are best for this work. These tools mimic a search engine visiting your site to give you an idea of all the URLs which your site makes available to the search engines. Perform a “site: search” from the search engine to discover all the URLs that can be crawled within the website.
XML Sitemap: Another source for the possible crawls is your XML sitemap. This file should contain the list of all the important pages on your site. Study this list with the URLs collected by your crawler tool, to check if they are complete.
Manual Check: It may happen that some pages are not crawled at all, by the auto tools. Always perform mapping to search for any pages that are not present in the crawling list. Check what is written in older posts, in the ‘blogroll’, and pages, which might have last been updated quite a long time ago.
Find Website URLs with Hits
The next procedure that is required is to determine which URL on your website got hit. This step assists in telling those that are active from those that may probably be orphaned.
Google Analytics: It includes going to Google Analytics account, you login and go to Behavior tab then Site Content and finally All Pages. This report will list all the pages on your site and the number of hits on each page. Save this information to export the data and get a global picture.
Server Logs: Another way of identifying URLs with hits is to look at the logs of your server. Server logs include all the requests that are made on your server and information such as the URL of the request, time, and user agent. The log files can be processed by means of such tools as AWStats or GoAccess to obtain the required information.
Webmaster Tools: Google Search Console helps one understand the URLs which are the targets of impression and or clicks from the search results pages. Go to the Performance report to identify which of the website’s pages have been visited through the search engines.
Check Cross-Reference for Two URLs
Having lists of crawlable URLs and URLs with hits at one’s disposal, the further step is to compare these lists in order to establish orphan pages.
Data Comparison: Subtract the first list from the second using functionality of any spreadsheet software, it might be Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. To this end, conduct a VLOOKUP or a similar procedure with a view of matching the lists of URLs crawled against the list of URLs with hits. Any URL that is in the design’s crawlable list but not in the hits list is a candidate for being an orphan page.
Internal Link Analysis: There are tools out there that give Internal Link Analysis feature one of them is Screaming Frog. It demonstrates the interconnectivity of each of the web pages with the other within your site. Finally, absolute the pages without any inbound internal links, this may point to specific orphan pages.
Manually Verify Orphan Pages: Once you have a list of potential orphan pages, then, confirm the results manually, to check if they are actually inaccessible from any other page of your site. This step avoids a situation where you are identifying the wrong pages because of crawl errors or other issues.
How to Fix Orphan Pages of Your Website?
Orphan pages in a website should be rectified because they affect the usability of the website. Of all the strategies that can be adopted to ensure that orphaned pages are retrieved, the most common is interlinking. Including internal links from other pages of your website, you will make users visit such resources more often, and also improve the probability of search engines to index these resources correctly. This means when placing links one should do so with the context of the content so that it is informative and makes the journey through the site better.
Further, identifying its tasks, it may also be useful to conduct a content audit to figure out whether the orphan pages contain valuable information. If the content on these pages is old, irrelevant, or of a poor quality, then these pages should be merged, updated, or deleted. It is another way of cleaning the site and at the same time helps to consolidate good- quality and focused content that are easily promoted. Handling orphan pages does not necessarily require substantial changes in your site, by integrating internal linking and concentrating on the quality of pages, you can significantly improve site’s ranking in SERP.
To summarize, if you are still having issues with fixing orphan pages, then you can always consult EZ Rankings. EZ Rankings is the best local SEO company; which provides adequate site optimization services. First, our team will start with a comprehensive site audit to know how orphan pages might have been created and how they can be fixed. We will also try to optimize your internal linking to help users find everything on your site easily and to link all of the pages on your site together.