Finding Orphan Pages on Your Website – A Comprehensive Guide

Finding Orphan Pages on Your Website – A Comprehensive Guide. A web page without links, it´s known as an orphan page. Here, in this article, you can find How to find all your orphan pages and why fixing them is crucial for search engine optimization.

It´s not impossible to find web pages that have no links. If there are any websites on your page that visitors and search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing can’t reach. This is a problem you need to fix.  The name of these kinds of sites is Orphan pages. In this blog post, you’ll learn about what orphan pages are. How to find them, and why fixing is important for search engine optimization. 

What is an Orphan Page?

Any web page on a website that has no links is called an orphan page. 

Google search engine finds new web pages in one of two ways:

• Search engine crawlers follow a link from another page.
• Crawlers find the website´s URL listed on the XML sitemap. 

Orphan pages are usually displayed with a notice tag rather than an error tag. Since sometimes sites hide their landing pages on objective using this SEO technique.

If you need a web page to be indexed and noticed by search engines. You must uncover orphan pages on your site and take the essential measures.

Why Are Orphan Pages an SEO Issue?

If a search engine is not able to find any orphan pages through web pages links, it becomes an issue. Because that page usually goes unindexed and never shows up in search results. Even if your webpages are listed in your site’s XML sitemap, it can be a search engine optimization issue for the following reasons:

• Orphan pages might include outdated content that might decrease your domain authority.
• Generally, web pages get orphaned during the procedure of site migration. This can be a problem as the orphan pages might have helpful content. That could help you in increasing your rankings on the search engine result page.

Orphan Pages vs. Dead End Pages

Before we dive into orphan pages, it´s necessary to clarify that dead-end pages and orphan pages are two different things. 

Orphan pages aren’t reachable from any other web pages, that is why they are called an orphan. But dead-end pages aren’t linked to any external or internal sites for the search engine crawlers or visitors to explore. This creates a dead-end, thus the name.

When a website visitor reaches a dead-end web page, they have two choices – leave the website or hit back.

While it´s effortless to fix any dead-end page by just adding links to the sidebars/footer navigation to the web page, orphan pages work differently. Let’s see the best way to find out orphan pages.

How to find Orphan Pages on a Website?

Get a list of your website URL’s

It’s a dull and sometimes inconceivable task for search engine crawlers to locate orphan pages. Because of this, using a search engine optimization tool would prove to be hard. Since they operate on information accumulated by crawlers.

The most reasonable way to find an orphan page is to gather a list of all the URLs on your website. All of that with the help of a Google Analytics report. You can also take help from any other preferred analytics package for this.

Fix Page Duplicate issues

The most common reason for pages becoming stranded probably won’t be something you would contemplate. Page duplication is an issue that is commonly neglected and must be quickly managed. Each page duplicate should redirect you to an URL. And assuming it doesn’t, then, at that point, it´s a given that the adaptations of that page won’t be connected. This can end up with them becoming orphan pages.

In the present circumstance, the fact that these pages are duplicates is the primary issue. This is the first thing you should check when searching for orphan pages on your website when reviewing your webpage. There are two kinds of page duplicates you should watch out for:

Non-Canonical Pages

Each page on your website should use the HTTPS or HTTP conventions, alongside www or non-www in the URLs reliably

So, you should check every one of your public pages. By composing in the program every one of the variations of your pages, something like this:

https://www.xyz.com

http://www.xyz.com

https://xyz.com

http://xyz.com

This multitude of variations should take the clients to precisely the same page with a steady URL. This will make the web pages canonical to themselves. Assuming any of these variations isn’t diverting the browsing to the ideal webpage. Then, at that point, you realize it very well may be a huge issue. Whichever variety is causing this problem, you should check it with different web pages too.

Trailing Slashes

This is one more minor thing to pay mind to, which can have a significant effect. Assuming your website isn’t using trailing slashes reliably, it may wind up stranding a portion of your pages. We should see another example:

https://example.com/page1/

https://example.com/page1

These URLs might give the same substance to the clients, yet their URLs are different from one another.

Check your web pages with both variations to see whether they are redirecting the clients to the same page. Guarantee that each of your web pages is doing this reliably. You can compel this process to deal with itself in “.htaccess”. To guarantee this multitude of variations redirect the clients to the same URL.

Compare the rundown of Crawlable URLs and Analytics URLs utilizing Google Analytics

Assuming you’re considering how to look for orphan pages on a website, this is the easiest way. You simply need to gather every one of the URLs of your website by visiting the “Webpage Content” segment. And then clicking on “All Pages”.

The rundown will pop up with these areas:

• Page (URL)
• Pageview
• One of a kind Pageview
• Average Time on the Page
• Date Range

You should zero in on Date Range and Pageviews areas to go through the typical pages from orphan pages. 

Since orphan pages are not open to clients, they will undoubtedly have the least page views. Simply click on “Pageviews” to carry the least saw pages to the top. And all your orphan pages will in all likelihood come first.

Another choice is to tap on “Date Range” and set the beginning date of the channel a long time ago. Before Google Analytics was even a thing. Google Analytics can just show you up to 5,000 URLs all at once. So, select the highest number of columns at the base from the “Show Rows” area. Without a doubt, all your orphan pages are under this 

When each one of the URLs has finished stacking on Google Analytics, do this. Click on a product to get a CSV or dominate document for your URLs. You can even put Google Analytics API to use here to accelerate the process. 

When you start this rundown, you just need to add the significant capacities to recognize crawlable URLs and Analytics URLs. Check out the picture underneath to get an outline of this:

Then, you want to recognize the orphan URLs from the rundown by contrasting the rundown of Analytics URLs and Crawlable URLs. In the example here, the last connection “https://xyz.com/7” is an undeniable orphan page. This rundown will be extremely long. And you should filter through a lot more URLs to look for the orphan pages.

You can without much of a stretch robotize this mechanical process. Use the match formula underneath to check assuming every URL in the Crawlable rundown is also in the Analytics list:

“=match(E2,$A$2:$A$11,0)”

The dollar signs convey a message to the sheet to not change the reach. For when the formula is just down a particular segment. On top of that, the worth “0” shows Google that the rundown isn’t arranged.

After running this formula, the matches will be back to the primary situation in the reach. The ones that don’t coordinate will be back with a “#NA” blunder. Because they were not found in the Crawlable List segment. So, in our example, “https://xyz.com/7” would be displayed with “#NA”.

This would show all the orphan pages for you naturally in the rundown. You just need to gather all the #NA results by filtering them out.

Take the assistance of different tools to find your Orphan URLs

When you know how to catch orphan pages on the website, there are many tools out there that can assist you with smoothing out the process.

The accompanying tools are the ones that give the best arrangements and capacities for this reason:

• Moz Link Explore
• Ahref
• SEMrush
• Raven Tools

These tools have plenty of elements that can help you in numerous things besides looking for orphan pages. Out of these, Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush give explicit tools that can help in finding stranded pages much quicker.

Another benefit is that these tools will also discover a few pages on your website that were not being crept straightforwardly and are no orphan pages. This can help you in fixing these pages.

Conclusion:

Orphan pages might negatively affect your entire SEO strategy.

So, it´s important to treat them well. With this guide, you can easily detect your orphan pages on the site.

And effectively deal with them without hurting the SEO of your site. Still, if you´re struggling with this issue, contact us by email anytime and we’ll help you with it!