What is an orphan page

An orphan page is a page on a website that has no internal links pointing to it.
This makes it more difficult for Google to rank the orphan page, as internal links pass context, meaning, and authority.

How to find orphan pages on a website

1. Use ScreamingFrog to find ophan pages on your site
2. Crawl your site using the sitemap.xml as the source
3. Once the crawl has finished, switch the content type to HTML
4. Move the scroll bar for the crawl results to the right until you see the InLinks column
5. Sort this column in ascending order.

Pages listed here with zero inlinks are effectively orphan pages as they have no internal links pointing at them.

How to fix orphan pages

To stop pages being orphan in nature, they need internal links from other pages on the site pointing to them.

To find internal link opportunities, take a look at our Internal Linking guide.

Are orphan pages bad for seo

The orphan page itself will struggle to rank within Google’s search results.

If you have too many pages that struggle to rank, Google may deem the overall site quality as low.

There are legitimate reasons for having orphan pages on a site. Once reason is PPC landing pages.
If you do still want orphan pages on your site, it may be useful to label them with the noindex directive.