Orphan pages
Free orphan page checker, up to 5,000 pages
An orphan page is a page your site still serves and no longer links to. It is easy to make one: delete a menu item, retire a category, redesign the blog index, and the pages behind it stay online with every route to them gone.
Enter a domain. The crawler follows your links, reads your sitemap, and lists every page it could only reach because the sitemap or a redirect named it.
Three ways the crawl reveals an orphan
Following links cannot find a page with no links. So the crawl compares what the links reach with three other sources, and reports the difference.
Your XML sitemap. The crawler reads the sitemaps named in robots.txt and at /sitemap.xml, and fetches the pages they list. A page that answered 200 and has no internal link from any other page appears in the Orphan pages check, with how the crawl discovered it. The Sitemap coverage check marks the same pages “Only reachable via sitemap”.
Redirects. A link or a sitemap entry that redirects leads the crawler on to the destination, which is reported when no page links to it directly.
Search Console. Export the Pages table from the Performance report and import it on the scan page. The Orphans in search check then lists pages Google is showing in results that the crawl never found, or found with no internal link pointing at them, with their clicks and impressions. These are the orphans worth fixing first: they already earn impressions with no help from the site.
What counts, exactly
A page is reported as an orphan when all of these are true:
- It was fetched and answered with a 2xx status.
- It is a page, not an image, script or stylesheet.
- No internal link on any other page points at it. A page linking to itself does not count.
- It is not the page the crawl started from.
Two neighbours of the orphan are reported beside it. Pages whose every inbound link is nofollow are linked for readers and orphaned for search engines; the internal link counts name them. And pages linked only from the template, never from another page's content, are listed by the link positions check: not orphans, but pages nobody chose to link to.
Fixing an orphan page
The page should exist. Link to it from the page a reader would expect to find it on: the category it belongs to, a related article, the parent service page. One link in the content of a relevant page is worth more than a row in the footer.
The page was replaced. Redirect it to its replacement with a 301 and take it out of the sitemap.
The page should be gone. Remove it, let it answer 404 or 410, and take it out of the sitemap. An orphan left in the sitemap asks search engines to index a page the site itself has abandoned.
The page is unlinked on purpose. A landing page for an advertisement or a thank-you page after a form is meant to have no links. Give it noindex and leave it out of the sitemap, and it stops being a finding.
The same check as a query
Every scan can be downloaded as a SQLite database, and the orphan check is a short query over it. Change it to suit: add a path filter, or join pages for the titles.
SELECT u.url
FROM urls u
WHERE u.kind = 'page'
AND u.state = 'fetched'
AND u.status_code BETWEEN 200 AND 299
AND NOT EXISTS (
SELECT 1 FROM links l
WHERE l.to_url = u.url AND l.internal = 1 AND l.from_url != u.url
)
ORDER BY u.url;The start page comes out of this version too; the check on the site leaves it out.
What no orphan checker can see
A page that is not linked, not in the sitemap, not a redirect target and not known to Google leaves no trace outside your server. To find those, export the full list of URLs from your CMS or your server logs and compare it with the crawl's URL list. The scan's database makes that a one-line comparison.
The crawler also obeys robots.txt and does not sign in, so pages it is not allowed to fetch are counted as blocked, not as orphans.
Questions people ask
- What is an orphan page?
- A page that exists and answers normally, and that no other page on the same site links to. A visitor can only reach it by typing the address, following a link from another site, or finding it in a search result. A crawler that follows links never arrives.
- If nothing links to a page, how can a crawler find it?
- It cannot, by following links. Every orphan checker depends on a second source that names the page: the XML sitemap, a redirect that lands on it, or a list of the pages Google already knows. This one uses all three. A page that is in none of them is invisible from outside the server, to this tool and to every other.
- Are orphan pages bad for SEO?
- Usually. Internal links are how search engines discover a page, judge how much the site itself values it, and understand what it is about from the anchor text. An orphan gets none of that. It may still be indexed through the sitemap, and it will rank below where the same page would with a few relevant links pointing at it.
- Is an orphan page the same as a dead end?
- No, it is the opposite. An orphan has no links coming in. A dead end has no links going out, so a reader who lands there has nowhere to go. The internal link check in the same scan lists dead ends.
- How many pages can it check, and what does it cost?
- Up to 5,000 pages in one crawl, free, with no account. The limit is the same signed in or out.
Find the pages your site forgot
Read next
- Internal link checker — links in and out of every page, click depth, anchor text, where on the page each link sits, and an internal PageRank score.
- Noindex checker — every page carrying noindex or another robots directive, in a meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header, across the whole site.
- Soft 404 checker — pages that answer 200 OK while their title or heading says the page is not there.
- The free site crawler — the crawl all of these checks read from, and what else it records.