What Is An Orphan Page?

Date First Published: 15th September 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 4/10

CONTENTS

Difference Between Dead-End Pages and Orphan Pages

Learn more about what an orphan is in this article.

An orphan page, also known as an orphaned page, is a webpage that exists, but has no hyperlinks pointing to it from any other page and can only be found by knowing and typing the URL.

Orphan pages are an SEO issue because web crawlers have difficulty discovering and indexing them, since they rely on hyperlinks to find new pages. However, they can discover them through a sitemap file or external links to the orphan page. In addition, users cannot find orphan pages unless they know the URL, causing any important or useful information to be wasted. Tools, such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider can find orphan pages on a website.

How Do Orphan Pages Occur?

Orphan pages can occur due to the following reasons:

Recently published pages that have not been linked to other pages yet.
Pages used to test the functionality of a website.
CMSes creating additional and unknown pages as part of their plugins, themes, or templates.
Old pages that are no longer needed being unlinked but not deleted.
Duplicate versions of pages that display the exact same content, but have a different URL (e.g. the homepage may be accessible from both https://example.com/index.html and https://example.com unless a 301 redirect is used to permanently redirect one version from another).

Difference Between Orphan Pages and Dead-End Pages

Orphan pages are not the same as dead-end pages. Orphan pages are webpages that have no internal or external links pointing to them, meaning that they cannot be found anywhere on the website and are isolated from the other pages. The orphan page may consist of internal and external links to other pages, but there are no pages that link to the orphan pages. However, dead-end pages might have links to them. But, they consist of no internal or external links, forcing users to click the back button on their browser. A page can be both a dead-end and an orphan page if it has no links pointing to it and no internal or external links pointing to other pages.