What’s the #1 reason to create new blog posts and pages on a website? To get more traffic, especially from search engines, right?
What if you’ve a few pages that can’t be discovered by your website visitors and search engines? That’s a problem to fix.
Finding orphan pages (pages with no links) should be your top priority if you’re determined to boost organic traffic to your websites.
In this detailed guide, we’ll talk about what orphan pages are all about, what problems you’ll face when you’ve them, and how to find and fix them easily.
So, are you curious to find more details? Let’s jump into the details.
Table of Contents
What Is An Orphan Page?
An orphan page is a page without any links. That means these pages are not linked to from another section of your website. It is just like a home without an address, a city without a pin code.
Orphan page, as the name itself defines it, is “a page without a parent link, i.e, an orphan”.
The first step to rank your pages on search engines like Google is to index them. Creating highly engaging content, building quality backlinks, doing on-page optimization, etc., all come later, but first, you need to index a page so it shows up in Google search results.
These pages, which are not even included in your website’s sitemap, don’t rank in Google search because they don’t have any links pointing to them (whether internal or external).
So basically, to rank your pages in Google search, Google bots first need to know your pages exist. For that purpose, your pages need links either from your own site or other sites.
If you’re creating too many articles on your blog, there will be high chances that you might forget building links for a few of those articles or even interlinking to them from other pages. This is where the orphan pages problem arises.
That’s why you need to find and fix orphan pages to improve your organic rankings for every blog post or page you publish on your website.
To put it simply, orphan pages are pages that can only be accessed via a direct URL and cannot be accessed from other pages on a website.
Read: SEO Best Practices for 2026: Your Ultimate Guide to Dominating Google Rankings
The Real SEO Problems Caused by Orphan Pages
As we already discussed above, to be found in Google search, Google search bots should definitely know about the existence of your pages. Search engine bots usually follow links to index your pages.
Only after indexing your pages will they start appearing in Google search results. Only when your pages start appearing in search results will you have the chance to improve their rankings organically.
So if you’ve too many orphan pages, it’s definitely bad for SEO. Because search engines like Google are not going to index those pages in the first place, there’s no way you’re going to get found in Google, so no rankings and search traffic to your site.
These pages are bad for SEO for so many reasons, including:
- They prevent you from getting more traffic from Google
- Low conversion rates
When we mentioned the links, they include every link, such as;
- Links from other sites
- Links from sitemap
- Links from your own articles which are relevant (internal links)
- Home page links
- Category links and so on
So what’s the bottom line?
If an article or a page on your website is essential to you, you should definitely add links to that page from other relevant pages on your site to make Google index that page first and rank it afterwards.
Read: Silo Structure for SEO: The #1 Way to Outrank Even Authority Sites In 2026
Orphan Pages vs Dead-End Pages: What’s the Difference?
As we already discussed above, orphan pages are defined as pages without any incoming links, and they are isolated from your website’s link structure, so people can’t find them (including search engine crawlers) without knowing a particular page URL.
Dead-end pages are also similar to orphan pages as they become a dead end and leave your website’s visitors with nothing to do next and nowhere to go.
Here are a few examples of dead-end pages on a website.
- 404 pages, which are also treated as broken links
- Author pages (make sure to include links to either the about us page or other important pages on your site instead of just putting some information about the author in author pages, so that you can avoid dead-end pages)
- eCommerce checkout pages (what are you doing when someone makes a purchase from your eCommerce store? If you’re not giving them any further options, either to check out related products or something, they will just exit your site.
The best way to find dead-end pages on your site is to use Google Analytics.
Use your Google Analytics to track the paths your website visitors take and find out which pages on your site have the highest exit rates. That way, you can either add more links or fix your 404 pages to eliminate or reduce the number of dead-end pages on your site.
Read: How to Start a Blog in 2026 and Make Over $10,000 Every Month from it [Step By Step Process]
How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages on Your Website (3 Proven Methods)
Let’s now talk about the most critical section. How to find and fix all the orphan pages on your website?
To find and fix these pages on your website, you need to have access to a few SEO tools, such as:
- Semrush
- Yoast Premium SEO plugin
- Screaming Frog
Although you don’t need access to all of the above tools, we’ll talk about how you can use each of these tools to easily find and fix orphan pages on your site.
Are you ready? Let’s get started!
1. How to Identify Orphan Pages with Semrush (Step-by-Step)
One of the best ways to find all the orphan pages on your website is to use Semrush.
Semrush is the ONLY SEO tool we’ve been using for more than 3 years at Bloggers Passion, and it’s also the most recommended tool by SEO experts.
If you’re wondering about what you can do with Semrush, here are a few benefits of using this tool.
- perform keyword research with ease
- Find and estimate the traffic of any website
- perform site audits (here’s where you can also find orphan pages)
- competitor analysis
- domain-to-domain comparison
- brand monitoring
- and the list goes on
You need access to the Semrush tool, so use the link above to get a free trial and easily find orphan pages on your website.
You need to use the “site audit” feature from Semrush to be able to find all the orphan pages on your site. If you’re wondering about how to conduct site audits, here’s the step-by-step tutorial on how to use Semrush to easily find orphan pages.
Step 1: To use the site audit feature, you need to first create a project with your website URL. Once you create a project using your website URL, wait for Semrush to crawl your website.
Once it’s done, Semrush site audit gives you an overview of your website by providing you a total score out of 100 (the higher the score, the fewer issues your site has).
Here’s what it looks like;
- Go to the Issues tab
- Click Select an Issue
- Check the Notices section
- Find Orphaned Pages
View the list of URLs with no internal links then add relevant internal links to fix them, and Re-run the Site Audit to confirm fixes
2. How to Detect Orphan Pages with Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Install and open Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Crawl your website in Spider mode
- Export all internal URLs
- Upload your XML sitemap or URL list
- Compare crawled URLs with sitemap URLs
- Identify pages not found in internal links
- Add internal links or redirect unnecessary pages
One of the best ways to find orphan pages on your website is to use the premium WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. It’s an exceptional SEO plugin for optimizing your blog posts and pages for your target keywords.
Besides optimization, it also helps you easily find orphan pages on your website.
Here are a few simple steps to orphan pages:
- Install Yoast SEO Premium
- Go to Posts → All Posts in WordPress
- Click the Orphaned Content filter
- View pages with no internal links
- Once you click on the “Orphaned Content” tab, you’ll be shown a list of all the orphaned pages with titles and links to the posts or pages.
Above all, you can also easily manage your website’s permalink settings and edit things like removing stop words from slugs, managing some redirects, and canonical settings.
What to do after finding orphan pages on your website?
So far, we’ve discussed various SEO tools for finding orphan pages on your website.
Now, what to do once you find orphan pages on your site?
Fortunately, dealing with orphan pages on your site is extremely easy (though time-consuming).
You just need to add one or two (preferably more than 2) internal links to each orphan page discovered on your site.
That’s it.
You just need to know how to do interlinking to other posts that are relevant, and your orphan pages problem is solved instantly.
Make sure to fetch as Google once you start updating all your blog posts and pages with relevant internal links.
FAQs
Here are few interesting questions around orphan pages that you might find useful to deal with them better in 2026 and beyond.
Orphan pages can occur on a website for so many reasons including;
→ old pages being unlinked but already published
→ issues with your website architecture
→ not interlinking to your own pages from a page (or not building any links to a page)
So if you can take care of the above things, you can easily avoid orphan pages occurring on your website in the future. Just make sure to add internal links to every post and page you create
Having few orphan pages doesn’t do any harm to your website but having too many orphan pages can result in various issues such as;
→ Not getting discovered by your website visitors
→ Not getting indexed in Google search
→ Leading to a bad site architecture
→ And the list goes on
There are multiple ways to find and fix orphaned pages on your website. But the simplest and most effective way is to get access to few tools such as;
→ WordPress SEO by Yoast premium version (as it helps you easily identify all the orphan pages and posts on your site with no inbound links)
→ Semrush (it is one of the most powerful SEO tools to easily fix your orphan pages on your website)
→ Screaming Frog (another useful SEO tool most people use to easily detect and fix orphan pages from a website)
Orphan links are pages with no links (mostly internal links from the same website), which means, they can’t be found by website visitors and search engines can’t index them.
Broken links are those links which don’t exist (anymore). If you click a broken link, you’ll see a 404 page displaying the webpage is not available (or messages like “page not found”).
Yes, every website should include an XML sitemap as it makes it easier for Google to discover the pages on your site. That means, whenever you publish an article on your site, it gets included in your sitemap so that search engine crawlers can easily find your newly published content and index it faster.
Final Thoughts
The BEST way to get rid of orphan pages from your site is to add internal links to every blog post and the page you publish. Try to include at least one or two internal links for every post or page to the relevant articles on your site to avoid orphan pages within your website.
Fortunately, there are tools like Semrush, SEO by Yoast, Screaming Frog etc which can help you easily find all the orphan pages on your site easily. Make sure to add internal links once you find those orphan pages and you’re good to go.
Did you like this guide on finding orphan pages? Do you’ve any more questions? Do let us know in the comments.
Hi Anil Sir,
Huge fan of your blog just wanted to ask whether manully generated XML is better than Plugin??
Aayush, plugin will also do the same task. You need to submit the same via Google Search Console and should have any errors.
Hi Anil Sir,
This is a very comprehensive guide on Orphan Pages. I love to find orphan pages using SEMrush and Screaming Frog tool.
I think that Orphan pages are common on sites that are publishing content on high Quantity.