What Are Website Orphan Pages? Why Are Orphan Pages Bad For SEO?

Search Engines Monster
3 min readJul 23, 2021

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Orphan pages are a familiar term in Search Engine Optimization. This is considered as one of the most negative SEO in 2021. But it is also easy to fix.

What are Orphan Pages?

Orphan pages are some of the web pages on the website that do not receive any links from other pages. People can find these pages in search engines but not on websites because orphan pages do not get a single point from other pages. Therefore orphan articles are considered as negative SEO (search engine optimization).

The neglected pages of the websites are called orphan pages. Not a single page does not refer to that page.

People can find orphaned pages from the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Though orphaned pages do not receive any reference from the mother website their URL is present in the sitemap.xml. So search engines crawler can discover and sometimes indexed them.

In a general sense, orphaned pages are unlooked like scary for the website SEO, but believe me, this is one of the biggest mistakes in the SEO strategy.

The Burden of the Website

Orphan pages are deadly harmful to the website. Although they don’t seem too much at first if you just try thinking then it will be so uncomplicated.

Reputed search engines like Google, Bing servers for the help of users. They bring to the fore what is valuable for the users. Now let’s think about the orphaned pages. Those web pages don’t get value to their website, as a result; they don’t get one single reference from the other pages.

Where the owner himself thinks those pagers are worthless, how can Google value them?

Ultimately, orphan pages have become a wastage for the website.

Why are orphan pages bad for SEO?

Orphan pages makes several harmful effects on the SEO of the website.

  1. Wastage of crawl budget
  2. Contents of the orphan pages become valueless.
  3. Low ranking on search result pages for those pages
  4. So reduced organic traffic for the websites
  5. When a website contains too many orphan pages. Then Google gets confused about the purpose of the website. So it overall affects the website.
  6. In the end, it downs the website brand value.

How to Identify Orphan Pages on the Website?

The most effective way to identify orphan pages is called the URL mapping technique. In this process, SEO experts start crawling with one webpage. Then find the following page pointing to the current one. Next, he moves to the following page and this process is going on until the end of the dead-end page.

After auditing the URL mapping SEO experts look for the SERP crawled pages.

Then compare the two reports and find the pages that receive no references.

How Do I Fix Orphan Pages?

The most effective practice for orphan pages is to resolve all of them. If your visitors don’t need any web content then remove them or make them helpful for users.

There are three easy steps to fix orphan pages.

  1. Find some relevant points between the orphan pages and other pages. Then, link to the orphan page from that normal page.
  2. If you do not determine any relevance to the whole website then update your content and link that to the website’s other page.
  3. If there is no option to link with the main website. Then archive it as ‘no needed content.’

Conclusion

Orphan pages are one of the biggest SEO mistakes SEO. They are not hard to fix. So, every SEO company needs to resolve them for avoiding SEO drop and get good results from Google.

Originally published at https://www.searchengines.monster on July 23, 2021.

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Search Engines Monster
Search Engines Monster

Written by Search Engines Monster

Search Engines Monster is the best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service provider company in Bangladesh.

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