An orphan page is a page that no other page of your website links to. Visitors can't reach it by browsing, and search engines, which follow links, find it late or treat it as unimportant. It often happens to old offers, landing pages made for an ad, or pages left out of the menu after a redesign.
How Arva SEO finds them
A website audit follows the links on your website, and also checks the pages listed in your XML sitemap and, when Google is connected, the pages that appeared in Google search (Search Console) or brought visits (Analytics landing pages) in the last 90 days. A page found that way that no checked page links to is an orphan page.
Connecting Google finds more of them: a page missing from your sitemap can't be found any other way.
See them
- Open a website and choose Website audit in its menu, under Check & improve.
- Open the issue Orphan pages (no internal links).
- Each page says where it was seen: the sitemap, Google search or Analytics.
Fix them
- A page you want people to find: link to it from a related page (a service page, a blog post on the same topic), a category page or the menu. One or two links from relevant pages are enough to start.
- A page that's out of date: redirect it to the best current page, or remove it from the sitemap and mark it noindex.
- A page that should stay private (a thank-you page, a page only for an email campaign): mark it noindex and leave it out of the sitemap. It can then stay unlinked.
The next audit checks the pages again, and the issue closes once they're linked.