## What Are Orphan Pages?
**Orphan pages** are pages on a website that don’t have any outgoing links. This means they don’t link to anywhere else on the website for further navigation or exploration and are effectively a dead end.
## Why Are Orphan Pages Harmful?
**Orphan pages are ultimately bad for** **[SEO](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/search-engine-optimization)**. This is due to a few reasons.
### 1. They Can Be Viewed as a Doorway Page
Google may interpret an orphan page as a [doorway page](http://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/gateway-page). This might be because the content matches content elsewhere on the site, but has been included in an XML [sitemap] (https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/xml-sitemap-seo)and is missing a [no-index meta tag](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/no-index-meta-tag).
This is a [black hat technique](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/black-hat-seo) which may lead to a [Google penalty](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/google-penalty). This will lead to a vast drop in rankings in [SERPs](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/serp).
### 2. Difficult Navigation
Orphan pages make websites difficult to navigate for both the user and the [crawler](http://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/google-crawlers). This means a poor [UX (user experience)](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/user-experience-ux) and ultimately [unindexed](/marketing-glossary/indexing-seo) pages.
### 3. Key Content Is Missed
Orphan pages may have high-quality content that is unseen by the end user, which will affect [visibility](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/search-visibility-seo).
## Why Do Orphan Pages Occur?
Orphan pages can occur for a range of reasons.
- Pages with a limited lifespan expire and remain published on the website
- Page architecture experiences errors which are amended but Google bots crawled them beforehand
- Pages have not been redirected away from old content
- When creating the sitemap or [canonical tags](/marketing-glossary/meta-tags-seo) there has been an error in the syntax
- Pages with [A/B testing](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/a-b-testing) that are still live or have been recently
## How To Find And Fix Orphan Pages On Your Website
Considering the negative impact that **orphan pages can have on your website, it’s a good idea to nip them in the bud before it’s too late.** There are a few ways that you can identify orphan pages on your website.
- Review your website’s sitemaps
- Use log files
- Assess analytics data
Once you have discovered orphan pages on your website, you must take action.
If there is an orphan page that you want to keep as a part of your website, but don’t want the end user to view, **attach a no-index meta tag.**
Alternatively if the page is no longer any use to you, simply remove it and provide a [301 redirect](https://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/301-redirect).
If a page has become orphaned by mistake, then make it viewable to the end user and crawlable for the bots by [internally linking](http://growhackscale.com/marketing-glossary/internal-links) from another page on your website.
Make sure to include it in your sitemaps.
### Some Tools to Help You Deal With Orphan Pages
There are a few tools out there on the web that can help you find and fix orphan pages on your website.
- [SEMRush Site Audit](/go/semrush/site-audit)
- Screaming Frog
- Raven Tools
- Ahrefs
- Moz Link Explorer
### How Can We Help?
Have you got a large number of orphan pages that need tackling?
We can help you there - contact us and we’ll pair you with a team that will help you optimise every page on your site.
Not quite ready to hire help? You could always book onto one of [our training courses](https://growhackscale.com/academy) where we detail all our favourite SEO practises that will help you get to the top of SERPs.
