What is an orphan web page?

An Orphan Webpage is a web page on a website that is not linked to any other page. You should be able to trace a page all the way back to the home page. A page which links to another page and that page only links back to the calling page is still an orphan page. They are you could say are sibling orphan pages.

You don't have to link every page in your site directly from the home page but you should be able to follow a route back to the home page. If you notice on my site, we have next and previous links so that you can keep clicking the back link until you get to the home page.

One of Googles ranking signals is being able to link somehow back to the home page. Orphan pages will still be indexed by Google and show up in their search results but they won't have as high a score as a page that does. It won't immediately appear on page 1 of the search results. If it does, well done but it'll be the combination of other signals.

You might find some clusters of orphan pages in Wikipedia if you look carefully enough and they still rank number 1, Wikipedia is a special case site thats fawned over by all the search engines.

When you create a new page, be sure to check that it links back to the home somehow. The shorter the number of links to the home page the better but if you're going to be a large site, its going to be difficult. In my Universe Guide site, I create links to other likewise pages so you can trace eventually back to the home page.

A linked page is better than an orphan page.

Last Modified : June 2023