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. 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. 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. This is a black hat technique which may lead to a Google penalty. This will lead to a vast drop in rankings in SERPs. ### 2. Difficult Navigation Orphan pages make websites difficult to navigate for both the user and the crawler. This means a poor UX (user experience) and ultimately unindexed pages. ### 3. Key Content Is Missed Orphan pages may have high-quality content that is unseen by the end user, which will affect visibility.
## 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.
