If you’re like most website owners, you’ve probably heard of orphan pages. But what are they and how do they impact SEO? In short, orphan pages are pages on your website that have no content and aren’t linked to any other page on your site. This can have a major impact on your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Not only will these pages rank lower than pages with content, but they’ll also take up valuable space in your site’s index. 

In this article, we’ll explain what are orphan pages and how do they impact SEO. 

What Are Orphan Pages?

Orphan pages can be troublesome for a website because they don’t have any links pointing to them. This makes it difficult for users to find them, and it also makes it difficult for search engines to index the page. 

But, most orphan pages can be found by search engines through several different methods. 

These pages can be confusing because most people don’t realize that they exist. They are pages on websites that have no links from their own website (other than the sitemap). This means that most of the time, they are not found by Google through traditional search engines. 

But, orphan pages do still get indexed occasionally – usually when an updated sitemap is released. And, once Google finds and indexes it.

These pages can be extremely harmful to your site’s SEO because they don’t get any attention from Google or other search engines. This means that your web traffic will continue to flow toward the orphan page instead of toward your main website.

If you’re concerned about your SEO rankings and want to make sure that all of your web pages are being optimized correctly, then you should check for orphan pages and remove them if necessary.

The Impact Of Orphan Pages On SEO

The main reason why orphan pages are considered negative is that search engines like Google assume that a page with no links from within its own website has no importance. 

They can be good or bad, but in general, they are considered bad for SEO. There are two main reasons as follows,

• First of all, orphan pages undermine your entire site’s optimization efforts. Because Google sees them as negative factors impacting your ranking and traffic levels. Overall, they’ll start devaluing everything related to that orphan page (including your homepage). 
• Secondly, not having any link back to those orphans makes it very difficult for potential customers who might be looking for information. You’re essentially preventing people from finding what they’re interested in. It can damage both their impression of you and future business dealings with you altogether!

Therefore, orphaning an important page on your website is probably one of the worst things you could ever do!

How To Fix Orphan Pages?

Orphan pages can cause a lot of problems for your website. Not only do they divert attention away from the main content, but they also reduce the site’s authority and rankings.

The next step is to decide what to do with the orphan pages you have found on your site once you have collected all the data. 

The final decision should be based on how each orphaned page can help you achieve your SEO objectives. The key is to determine which orphan pages are worth resolving and which ones should be deleted altogether.

If you find yourself with a lot of orphan pages, it’s important to take action before they become more trouble than they’re worth. There are several steps you can take to fix these pages and make sure they remain viable: 

• First, check whether the page is important and where it should exist in the sitemap. If yes, add internal links and include them in your site structure. 
• If you’re not sure whether or not a page should be fixed, then first check to see if it’s ranking for any keywords. 
• If yes, there may be some value in keeping the page around. However, if no search engines are finding it useful, then chances are better than good that it should be removed. 
• If you notice that one of your pages is ranking lower than it should, there’s a good chance that it has orphan pages. This can be caused by several factors. 
• But, the most common reason is when a page isn’t optimized or offers no opportunity for rank growth because of the missing links.
• Make sure your page is optimized – Use keywords in the title and body of the page, provide alt text for images, include Google Analytics data if possible, etc. 
• These simple steps can help improve ranking potential if you start fixing missing links. 
• Keep in mind that removing an orphan page entirely is usually a better solution than trying to optimize it -orphaned pages tend not to rank as well as active websites anyway!
• However, if after optimization the page still doesn’t rank well, then it may be best to remove it altogether in order to prevent further damage.