What are Orphan Pages?
The pages without any links to them are called orphan pages. Visitors of websites and site crawlers will not be able to find them because they are doesn't link with other pages.
However, Orphan Pages can be found by search engines in search results. Sometimes they could also have been submitted for indexation with other pages but then never linked again. Mostly they are being indexed through the sitemap when crawlers crawl the sitemap and find the pages then index them.
These pages can appear for various reasons, including some old pages that have been unlinked but remain published, site architectural issues (Eg SILO or Flat structure), products that have sold out from inventory but are still available, etc.
Why Are Orphan Pages Harmful?
Many times you going through a question in mind is Does Orphan Pages Hurt SEO? But Search engines like Google or Bing assume that a page that doesn’t get any Internal links from within its own site has no importance. Even if your orphan pages are found in your website sitemap, they are still a problem for SEO.
1. Low Rankings:
Even if these pages have good content but they typically don’t rank well in SERPs or get many organic search results (Organic traffic).
2. Crawl Issues:
Low-value orphan pages can be problematic to crawl budgets from your important pages that need to rank.
3. Difficult Navigation:
These pages make websites difficult to navigate for both the user and the crawler. This is also very bad for the user experience and the crawler to crawl pages.
Orphan pages and Shopify stores
The orphan page (has no incoming internal links) is a big hassle for most Shopify stores, mostly due to store themes being used. Here's the link to an article explaining the problem.
Best techniques for internal linking?
- Optimize anchor text for your targeted primary keyword.
- Deep linking in your website Architecture.
- Put naturally readable internal links.
- Link with the best relevant content.
- Use do follow links for pages
- Use static HTML complete URLs.
What can you do with orphaned pages?
It’s common to get a link from a different website to a page that you then remove or redirect. Because the previous link still exists on that other website, Google will still find it and indicate its orphan page.
Sometimes you don't control the links on other websites, the only way to fix this type of orphan page is to reach out to the website manager and ask them to update to the correct link or redirect to the new location of the page.
There are several methods or tools you can use to identify orphan pages but konigle provides you an effortless solution for fixing orphan pages on your Shopify store.
A tool like an Audit Orphan Pages solves your all orphan pages' SEO problems in one place with a simple method.