How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages to Improve SEO? (2023)

FAQs

How do I fix orphan pages in SEO? ›

Orphan pages cause two main SEO problems: Low Rankings & Traffic: Even if they contain great content, orphan pages typically don't rank well in SERPs or get much organic search traffic. Crawl Waste: Low-value orphan pages (e.g. duplicate pages) can be stealing crawl budget from your important pages.

If so, all you need to do is set up a 301 redirect from the orphaned page to the newer page. A 301 redirect will simply tell search engines that they should not look at this page, and instead, look at the newer one. This will remove it from being an orphaned page.

A page without any links to it is called an orphan page. Search engines, like Google, usually find new pages in one of two ways: The crawler follows a link from another page. The crawler finds the URL listed in your XML sitemap.

Orphan pages do not have any links to them. Visitors and site crawlers will not be able to find them because there are no links to them.

Hidden content, when done correctly, can maximize the amount of content on a small mobile web page and help increase the amount of content that is indexed by search engines. That's a win-win for users and SEO. More Resources: 3 Ways to Find Hidden Spam Links & Text on a Webpage.

By using the 'is' function in the search bar at the top of your screen as shown below, you can use the search term 'is:unorganised' to quickly locate files which may have accidentally become orphaned.

Design Changes and SEO

You won't see much impact—if any—from updating your logo throughout the site, fixing some typos, or making other small updates. However, more extensive changes will affect your SEO. With a site rebuild, you can almost certainly expect to lose most, if not all, the SEO benefits you had originally.

Keyword Stuffing

Using a high density of keywords in your content can look like you are keyword stuffing, which will likely result in a penalty from Google and a drop in rankings. Instead, choose to use your keywords naturally throughout the article and avoid putting them all together as one massive block of text.

Is deleting pages bad for SEO? ›

Deleting low quality and outdated content can not only enhance the user experience on your site, it can improve SEO keyword rankings. Google would prefer to rank a website that has good content versus bad.

What causes orphan pages? Usually, orphan pages are accidental and occur for various reasons. The most common cause is not having processes for site migrations, navigation changes, site redesigns, out-of-stock products, testing, or dev pages.

Within and aside from the aforementioned are: cultural pressures, neglect, abuse, child slavery, religious inequity, child prostitution, indentured servitude and more. These are more closely associated with children without parental care that may not be a child that has lost one or more parents.

An orphaned work remains in the Archive attached to the orphan_account, and cannot be edited or deleted.

Orphan pages are indexable pages that have no internal links. This means there are no links to this page from anywhere on your site, and as such, orphan pages live outside the site structure. Without internal links, orphan pages can't be accessed from anywhere on your site.

Crawling: Google downloads text, images, and videos from pages it found on the internet with automated programs called crawlers. Indexing: Google analyzes the text, images, and video files on the page, and stores the information in the Google index, which is a large database.

You're now able to browse each tab and respective 'Orphan URLs' filter to view orphan pages found. For example, on the Screaming Frog website, there are some orphan URLs that error and redirect from the XML Sitemap.

While backlinks' importance to Google has waned over the years, earning natural links through high-quality content still helps with SEO. Backlinks have long been considered a crucial factor in determining a website's ranking on search.

How do I find orphan pages for free? ›

From the Google Analytics home page, navigate to the Behavior section on the sidebar. Select Site Content and then All Pages. You can pull a similar report from Google Search Console which can help you find orphan URLs through your XML sitemap.

Unfortunately, there isn't any way to turn off that feature at this time. You could try making the paragraph that's splitting longer or shorter to avoid the widow/orphan controls.

It's a common question in the SEO community and although crawl rates and index times can vary based on a number of different factors, the average crawl time can be anywhere from 3-days to 4-weeks.

Ad fraud can also result in low-quality links pointing to a website, which can hurt SEO. For example, if fraudulent links are created on low-quality or spammy websites, this can signal to search engines that the site being linked to is also low-quality or spammy. This can result in a decline in organic search rankings.

If you want to gain some organic traffic beyond the small topic that your single page site targets, for the love of the SEO gods, please create more than one page. If you offer more than one product or service, you should have unique pages for each of those products or services, ideally targeting one keyword per page.

Do search engines make a difference between WordPress pages vs posts? The answer is very simple: NO, they do not. It is all content to them and the same indexing algorithm applies to both post types.

As a result, many parents have died, rendering their children orphans. Some of the countries that have the highest orphan rates in the world include Russia, Iran, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Peru.

A child meets orphan requirements if: The child's parent(s) are legally deceased; and. The child has not acquired another parent (such as a stepparent or legal adoptive parent) as defined by U.S. immigration law.

Why is my SEO not improving? ›

A major reason why your SEO strategy suffers is if you don't have backlinks from authoritative, relevant websites. Google has a metric called “PageRank” that it uses as a factor to determine the search engine results.

Generally speaking, 10-30 pages of well-crafted content that showcase your products and services should be enough for most small to medium businesses. As long as you prioritize the user experience, you will get results.

Large page sizes can affect SEO and performance and cause search engines to rank your website lower. As such, now is the time to start understanding page size because, in the digital world, it matters.

Don't delete pages from your website unless it's absolutely necessary. Instead, update and improve your existing pages to keep these current. That way the page address will not change, and you can completely avoid all the problems that come with a 404 page not found error.

An orphan work is a term used to describe a copyrighted work, published or unpublished, whose proper rightsholder is difficult to determine or impossible to contact. This may occur for a number of reasons. The work may have been originally published anonymously.

In short, yes, an adult can also be an orphan. An orphan is typically defined as a child under the age of 18 who has lost one or both parents. When used in a broader sense, the word orphan applies to anyone who has lost their biological parents.

Zombie pages are webpages that generate little or no human traffic. They may be indexed, and they may generate bot traffic from search engine crawlers, but they fail to attract views from real visitors. Zombie pages are essentially lifeless webpages. Most zombie pages suffer from poor search rankings.

Food: Food and clean water are the most basic need for all children.

What are the two types of orphans? ›

Although many recognize an orphan as simply a child with no parents, orphans can actually be quantified into two different categories, biological and social, both of which have their own meanings and implications.

An orphan process is formed when it's parent dies while the process continues to execute, while zombie process is a process which has terminated but it's entry is there in the system.

Orphan: An orphan is the exact opposite of a widow. It's when the first line of a paragraph sits at the bottom of a page by itself. Runt: A runt can occur anywhere throughout a page or column, and it's when the last line found in a paragraph ends with a single word; this often happens with hyphenated words.

Orphaned technology refers to computer technologies that have been abandoned by their original developers. As opposed to deprecation, which tends to be a gradual shift away from an older technology to newer technology, orphaned technology is usually abandoned immediately or with no direct replacement.

2.1 Orphan Pages Cannot Be Indexed

These pages cannot generate any organic traffic to your site.

Widow/Orphan control Widows and orphans are single lines of text in a paragraph that print at the top or bottom of a text box or column. To prevent widows and orphans by always having at least two lines of text at the top or bottom of a text box, select the Widow/Orphan control check box.

Unfortunately, there isn't any way to turn off that feature at this time. You could try making the paragraph that's splitting longer or shorter to avoid the widow/orphan controls. That would be the only solution right now. The default should never be something that's not editable by the end user.

An orphan record is an imported transaction record that does not specify a site. To create a Maximo® database record from an imported record, you must specify a site on the transaction record. To edit orphan records, select Imported Transactions > Edit Orphan Records from the Select Action menu.

What are the struggles of being an orphan? ›

The orphans are susceptible to long-term psychological problems including depression, anger, anxiety, and feelings of sadness, and are inclined to withdraw and self-isolate.

“Page Has No Outgoing Links” Error

Ensure that your website has no “dead ends” by checking the reported pages. Then, simply add links to other relevant pages of the website related to the context of the page. If the absence of links is due to technical issues, address the developer to fix it.

The “Crawled —currently not indexed” report is indicating that the content is eligible to appear in Google's index, but Google is electing not to include it. There also could be other low quality pages to which Google is not applying this logic.

If you want more pages included in the Google index, use the Google Search Console to submit indexing requests. These requests will change the index for both Google search and your search engine.

If you only see a few pages with the “Discovered - currently not indexed” issue, try requesting indexing via Google Search Console (GSC). To do that, click “URL inspection” on the menu and enter the page's URL. If it's not currently indexed, hit the “Request indexing” button.