Search engines like Google rely on links to find content for indexing and ranking. But what happens if there are no links for search engines to follow?
These “orphan pages”—URLs without any internal links pointing to them—can hurt your rankings, confuse your visitors, and even waste your crawl budget.
In this post, I’ll show you the exact process I use to find (and fix) orphan pages. With these techniques, you’ll strengthen your internal linking structure and improve your site’s SEO foundation.
But before diving into the solutions, let’s explore what orphan pages are—and why they’re almost always bad news.
What Is an Orphan Page?
An orphan page is a webpage that doesn’t have internal links pointing to it from any other pages on a website.
Without internal links, search engines and visitors can’t navigate to a page from anywhere within the website’s structure. However, both might still be able to find the page via a direct or external link on other websites.
While you can create orphan pages deliberately, most are accidental and caused by mistakes during website migrations, restructuring, or testing.
Or, perhaps most commonly, by a simple lack of internal links.
Are Orphan Pages Bad for SEO? 4 Potential Problems
Orphan pages can be bad for SEO—especially if you didn’t mean to create one. Here are the main ways orphan pages negatively affect your website’s SEO:
1. Indexing Issues
Imagine you’ve just published a new page on your website but forgot to link it from other relevant pages. What happens next?
Well, if no internal links point to that page and you don’t include it in your sitemap, web crawlers like Googlebot will have a hard time crawling and indexing it.
Here’s a snippet from Google Search Central that explains how Googlebot discovers new pages:
“Some pages are known because Google has already visited them. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page: for example, a hub page, such as a category page, links to a new blog post.”
So, if Google can’t find your page, they won’t index it, meaning it won’t show up in search results.
2. Wasted Crawl Budget
A crawl budget is the number of pages on a website that search engines will crawl during a given time frame.
Each website has its own crawl budget, influenced by factors like site size, the number of pages, server speed, and more.
If your site has many orphan pages, they could waste a significant portion of the crawl budget.
Since Google can’t easily discover these pages, the bots may spend unnecessary time and resources trying to locate them. This takes crawling resources away from more important (linked) pages.
3. Poor Rankings
Google might crawl and index orphan pages, but they’re unlikely to rank well—if they rank at all.
The reason?
They lack internal links, which are critical for spreading PageRank. Google uses PageRank to measure a page’s importance (or “authority”) based on the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to it.
When your site’s pages link to each other, they share some of that authority, boosting their chances of performing well in search results.
Orphan pages miss out on this entirely. Without internal links pointing to them, they’re stuck in isolation. Sure, they can still gain authority from external backlinks, but being disconnected from your site’s structure can decrease their potential authority.
This lack of connection mostly affects the orphaned pages themselves. But if your site has too many of these stragglers, it can start to drag down usability, hurting your overall SEO performance.
4. Negative User Experience (UX)
Orphan pages don’t just pose SEO challenges—they can hurt user experience in specific ways.
For example, if a user lands on an orphan page via a direct link or external referral and finds it useful, they may want to locate it again later. If you don’t link to it and Google doesn’t index it, they won’t be able to find it in search results.
This can frustrate users, make them trust your site less, and prevent them from further exploring your content.
While internal linking generally improves UX by allowing visitors to explore related topics, orphan pages are uniquely problematic because they’re completely disconnected from your site’s structure.
This lack of visibility undermines both user satisfaction and the page’s ability to contribute to your overall website goals, such as driving traffic or conversions.
How to Find Orphan Pages on a Website (2 Ways)
While there are multiple ways to find orphan pages on your site, two approaches stand out for their effectiveness and reliability.
1. Conduct a Site Audit
A straightforward way to find orphan pages is through a website audit that automates the process.
I recommend using an orphan page checker tool like Semrush’s Site Audit because it makes it fast and easy to find these pages on your site. Plus, you can set up recurring crawls to monitor your website’s health over time.
Note: A free Semrush account lets you crawl up to 100 URLs for free with Site Audit. Or you can use this link to access a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription.
It works similarly to a search engine spider that follows the links it finds. If you’ve got an XML sitemap, it can see your entire website structure and gather even more info.
Then, Semrush compares the list of pages in your sitemap to the ones with organic traffic to those pages. If there’s a mismatch—like pages that are in your sitemap but nobody’s ever seen or pages that people have seen that aren’t in your sitemap—Site Audit will flag them as orphans.
Here’s how to find orphan pages in Semrush:
First, navigate to Site Audit, enter your website’s domain name, and click “Start Audit.”
After configuring the tool, Semrush takes a few minutes to crawl and analyze your site. Once done, head to the “Issues” tab to check out all your website’s errors, warnings, and notices.
Locate the search box under the “Issues” tab and type “orphan.” This will filter the list to show only the orphan page issues.
Review any orphan pages the tool identified and determine whether you should link to them or take another action (I will explain this more in the next section: How to Fix Orphan Pages).
2. Manually Crawl Your Website
You can use a website crawler like Screaming Frog to pull a list of your site’s URLs. (The free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs, but the paid version lets you crawl bigger sites.)
Once you’ve installed Screaming Frog, open it up, type your domain into the search bar, and hit “Start.”
Screaming Frog will crawl your website and show all the pages it finds in a report on the left side of the screen.
You can easily export all the crawled data into spreadsheets. Click the “Export” button in the top left corner and hit “Save.”
All your crawled data will be available in a separate Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.
To identify orphan pages, compare your Screaming Frog report with your sitemap and GSC lists. Any pages absent from all three sources might be true orphan pages that require further investigation.
A sitemap is like a roadmap for your website that helps search engines find and understand all your important pages.
To check your sitemap, type “/sitemap.xml” or “/sitemap_index.xml” at the end of your site’s URL (e.g., example.com/sitemap.xml). If the sitemap is available, it will open up as an XML file showing links to the pages on the site.
In the example below, the website has four different sitemaps for posts, pages, podcasts, and categories to improve indexing and help search engines crawl the content more effectively.
Now, let’s quickly compare how many URLs starting with “/podcast/” Screaming Frog crawled versus what’s in the sitemap.
| URLs starting with | Screaming Frog | Sitemap |
| https://hacktheentrepreneur.com/podcast/ | 389 | 368 |
There are 21 more URLs containing “/podcast/” crawled by Screaming Frog that aren’t found in the sitemap.
However, after a careful check, I noticed that these URLs are excluded from indexing and contain a 301 redirect. So, these seemingly orphaned sitemap pages aren’t orphan pages at all.
Now, let’s run the same test using Google Search Console (GSC) data.
An indexed page means a search engine has found and stored it in its database. This doesn’t mean it will appear in search results, but that it can appear.
If your page appears in your list of indexed pages in Google Search Console, then Googlebot knows it exists.
To see which pages are indexed in your Google Search Console account, head to the “Pages” report and hit “Export” to download it.
Now, let’s compare how many indexed URLs starting with “/podcast/” were crawled by Screaming Frog versus what’s in Google Search Console.
| URLs starting with | Screaming Frog | Sitemap | Google Search Console |
| https://hacktheentrepreneur.com/podcast/ | 389 | 368 | 325 |
It turns out there’s quite a difference between the sitemap and Screaming Frog data compared to what’s in GSC. So, here’s what I did next.
First, I checked if all 325 pages listed in GSC were also in the sitemap and Screaming Frog’s report. They were.
But then I spotted quite a few URLs from the Screaming Frog report that didn’t show up in GSC’s “Indexed Pages” report.
This means Google isn’t indexing these pages.
Some of those URLs had 301 redirects, which I discussed earlier. But other pages had a 200 “OK” status. They were open for indexing, yet Google didn’t index them.
Here’s an example.
One of those URLs is: “https://hacktheentrepreneur.com/podcast/hedge-bets-entrepreneur/.”
This could potentially be an orphan page, which Googlebot couldn’t discover and index.
If you follow this approach, go through all the URLs this method uncovers. If they’re valuable for your site, take steps to fix the issue. I’ve shared a few methods of how to do that below.
Keep in mind that manual checking could be a time-consuming process, and it still isn’t 100% reliable.
The nature of orphan pages not having any links pointing to them makes finding them with tools (that rely on links to find pages) pretty tricky. But these methods will get you most of the way there.
How to Fix Orphan Pages (4 Options)
There are two kinds of orphan pages:
- Intentional: These are the orphan pages you don’t need to worry about, like promotional or paid advertising landing pages or test pages
- Accidental: These are the unexpected orphan pages you might want to address
So, the first step is to determine whether you need to fix an orphan page.
I’ve put together this flow chart to help you manage orphan pages:
1. Add Internal Links
The simplest way to address orphan pages is by adding internal links from related pages.
Start by identifying relevant, related pages on your site. Then, insert contextual, in-content links where they feel natural and helpful for readers.
To improve the effectiveness of your orphan page internal links:
- Use descriptive anchor text: Choose anchor text that clearly describes the topic of the linked page. This text helps both users and search engines understand the relevance.
- Link from related pages: Ensure the pages linking to your orphan page share a thematic or topical connection to maximize its ranking potential (and provide a better user experience)
- Focus on user intent: Always link in ways that add value to the reader, guiding them to helpful, related resources
Following these best practices for internal linking helps improve your site’s structure, distribute PageRank more effectively, and enhance user experience.
If the orphan page serves a broader function, such as an important service or policy, you might consider placing links in your navigation menu or footer. These highly visible locations signal to search engines that the page is important—and make it easier for users to locate.
However, I’d always recommend adding internal links within pages and posts where you can, on top of these navigational links.
2. Use 301 Redirects
Another way to handle orphan pages is by using a 301 permanent redirect.
A 301 redirect is like a sign that says, “This page has moved.” It sends people and search engines to the new page so they don’t get lost, and most of the old page’s ranking signal is transferred to the new one (at least that’s the idea).
This can be especially helpful during a website migration—just set up a 301 redirect from the old page to the new one to preserve traffic and link equity. However, with orphan pages, you should only use redirects in specific scenarios.
For example, if an orphan page is a duplicate or near-duplicate of another page (e.g., due to trailing slash inconsistencies, HTTP vs. HTTPS versions, or www vs. non-www versions). In these cases, 301 redirects are a great way to consolidate these pages and avoid diluting your site’s authority and confusing Google (and users).
On the other hand, if an orphan page has unique value—such as useful content or backlinks—redirecting it may not be the right solution. Instead, you might focus on reintegrating it into your site’s structure by adding internal links or including it in your sitemap to ensure it’s discoverable.
For more details, check our beginner-friendly guide on redirects.
3. Noindex Them
If an orphan page:
- Isn’t getting organic traffic
- Isn’t useful for users
- Has no external or internal links pointing to it
Then, you might want to think about adding a “noindex” tag.
The noindex tag is a piece of HTML you can add to your page to tell search engines not to index it.
In cases where you have forum, log-in, or member-specific pages that don’t need to be publicly accessible, “noindex” tags are a common solution.
Adding a “noindex” tag to these URLs can help manage crawl efficiency. It’s a way to prioritize high-value content rather than wasting crawl budget.
4. Delete Them
If you’re sure you don’t need those orphan pages anymore, you can delete them, but not before double-checking that they’re not valuable enough to keep.
Analyze whether these pages have any backlinks, traffic, or rankings that contribute to your site’s performance. If they do, consider redirecting them to relevant pages instead of deleting them outright to preserve their value.
If you confirm the pages are unnecessary and delete them, Google will still crawl them for a while and return a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) status. Over time, Google will stop crawling these pages, and they’ll eventually disappear from search results.
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