Skip to content
Volume Nine
  • Capabilities
    • Social Media
    • Content
    • SEO
    • Paid Search
    • Analytics
  • Industries
    • Ecommerce
    • Consumer Products
    • B2B Brands
    • All Industries
  • Resources
    • Insights Blog
    • Guides
    • Success Stories
    • Speaking
  • About V9
    • The V9 Team
    • Join the Team
    • V9 Gives Back
  • Let’s Talk
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Youtube
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
(303) 955-5228
Orphan Puppy
Author - Brian Lich

SEO Best Practices for Orphan Pages

Brian Lich
  • SEO

An orphan page is a webpage that is not linked to from other pages. It’s floating in webspace, can be hard to get to, and sometimes hard to navigate from.

Yet, the fact of the matter is, sometimes orphan pages are needed. Landing or unindexed pages can create a valuable user experience when used correctly. But make sure you monitor and clean up orphan pages that no longer serve a purpose. Having useless orphan pages is a big no-no that could negatively affect your SEO efforts as it’s difficult for Google to crawl these pages and decipher what they’re about.

Why Orphan Pages?

A few of the main reasons why orphan pages might exist include: either purposely in an effort to create a private page on the site that is unavailable to the public, or by mistake when there is either a design or development flaw.

Some of these mistakes include:

  • Pages incorrectly redirect to your website from links on external sites.
  • Pages on a website expire during the crawling time.
  • Pages return corrected errors because the search engine is still crawling it.

Orphan pages might seem harmless, but in fact, these directionless components of your website can potentially be hurting your company’s SEO marketing efforts. Among other things, these pages can consume your crawl budget, greatly hinder the user experience and attract bad links.

Luckily, best practices for addressing orphan pages are easy to execute and very effective at boosting your site’s SEO.

Follow these 3 best practices for your site’s orphan pages:

  1. Avoid syntax errors when building your sitemap and creating canonical tags.
  2. Expired content should deliver the correct status code (for example, a 404 error page)
  3. Link all the pages of your website’s structure, such as landing pages or internal search result pages.

The fixes to orphan pages are worth the time and resource investment required. Improve your website’s searchability by addressing orphan pages, or contact us to help you design a strategy for optimizing your SEO marketing.

Subscribe Via Email

Categories

  • Content Marketing
  • Digital Marketing
  • SEO
  • Social Media
  • Uncategorized
  • V9 News

Recent Insights

  • 2021 Digital Marketing Stats 2021 Video Marketing Stats Brands Shouldn’t Ignore
  • Ski Resort Marketing 9 Ski Resort Content Marketing Strategies, In a COVID World
  • Resort Marketing Tips Resort Marketing: 10 Actionable Tips for a Post-COVID-19 World
  • How to Build A Stronger Business with Social Listening How to Build A Stronger Business with Social Listening
  • 2020 Digital Marketing Guide for Manufactures 2020 Digital Marketing Guide for Manufacturers

Related Insights

SEO Tools to Audit WordPress Websites SEO Tools for Auditing and Monitoring Your WordPress Website Can Direct Consumer Brands Win on Google with SEO Can Direct-to-Consumer Brands Succeed in Google SERPs? e-commerce-product-videos E-commerce Product Videos for SEO & Beyond

Looking to grow your business online?

From building brand awareness on social media to driving traffic from search engines, Volume Nine helps you connect with your target audience to grow your brand and revenue.

Let’s Talk!

Subscribe to V9 Insights via Email

Sign up for our trends, commentary, analysis, and maybe an occasional joke.

  • Capabilities
    • Social Media
    • Content
    • SEO
    • All Capabilities
  • Industries
    • Ecommerce
    • Consumer Products
    • B2B Brands
    • All Industries
  • Resources
    • Insights Blog
    • Videos
    • Success Stories
    • All Resources
  • About V9
    • The V9 Team
    • Join the Team
    • V9 Gives Back
    • Privacy Policy

OFFICE HOURS:

Monday - Friday 8am-5pm
p:(303) 955-5228 a:1312 17th St #942
Denver, CO, 80202
Privacy Policy

Volume 9, Inc 1312 17th St #942 Denver, CO 80202 (303) 955-5228

  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Youtube
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn