“(How to fix orphaned page)” when it comes to SEO and site rankings, every factor contributes to the growth of your website. You never may know what is limiting the growth of your site or why your site seems so slow in growth.
Study shows that some of your pages may be ranking with organic search traffic potential but these pages are missing from your site’s structure. These pages can be referred to as orphaned pages. While this is not the real meaning of the orphaned page, it is an instance of the orphaned page.
How to Fix Orphaned Page
This may be the question running through your mind when you found this article. It may also be because you know what these pages are and you are looking for a fix for them. While the fix isn’t found in this paragraph, we would be showing you how to fix them later on in this same article. But first, it will be nice to know what Orphan Pages are for a better understanding of the article. Just read below to get full info (How to fix orphaned page).
What are Orphan Pages?
An orphan page is a page on your website that is not linked to any other page on your website. Finding the orphaned pages on your website is a key factor in growing your website’s organic traffic. Fixing the orphaned pages on your website is a good signal to search engines that you know what you’re doing.
Diagnosing your website’s architectural structure is an easy way to find these pages. Why is this? Simply because checking for orphaned pages may highlight the areas of your site that have no internal links. Areas of your website with no internal links would result in a poor distribution of link equity.
A lack of good internal links may also cause a bad user experience and visitors would not be retained. Having orphan pages on your website would mean that the link would not likely be found by web crawlers like Googlebot. Even if these links are found they would highly be de-prioritized.
Why are Orphaned Pages Bad for SEO?
Since you already know what orphaned pages are and that it affects SEO, how exactly does it affect SEO? Well, there are two major ways in which orphaned pages affect SEO. These effects can also be known as the problems it causes SEO. Here are the two main ways.
- Low Search Rankings and Traffic.
- Crawl Waste.
Those are the two major ways in which orphan pages can affect your SEO.
Low Search Rankings and Traffic
We are sure you already know that traffic is the aim of any online business or blogger. Since this traffic is your major goal, why do you have to hurt yourself by having orphan pages? This is the reason why we would be showing you how you can fix these orphan pages in just a few minutes.
Crawl Waste
These low-value orphan pages or duplicate pages may just be stealing the crawl budget from your important pages. Orphan pages may be taken lightly by some bloggers but it is really a major threat to the growth of your website.
Finding Orphaned Pages
After knowing what orphaned pages are, another thing you shouldn’t fail to learn is how to find these links. There are different ways in which you can find orphaned pages on your website. If you run a WordPress blog, finding these links should be relatively easy.
How to Find Orphan Pages
How do we really go about finding orphan pages? Well, orphan pages can be found by making a comparison of the active URLs on your website and the URLS found on your log files. If you are using WordPress CMS, then you should get the Yoast SEO premium to get a list of all your orphan pages right from the WordPress control panel.
You can also use a tool like FandangoSEO to easily detect all your orphan pages in one click. All you have to do is sign up for an account at https://www.fandangoseo.com and give it access to your log files. You would get a lot of SEO reports after running your website on the platform.
Types of Orphaned Pages
There are two different kinds of orphaned pages that your website can have. These types are;
- The expected orphaned page that you don’t typically have to be concerned about.
- The unexpected orphan page that you should probably be concerned about.
Whatever route you want to take in fixing your orphan page would all depend on what type of page they are. Whenever you see a high volume of orphan pages on your website, you should check what they look like and the type of page they are.
How to Fix Expected Orphaned Pages
Before we talk about fixing expected orphaned pages, there are three different types of pages like this. We would be talking about them and how you can fix them. Here is a list of these types of links.
- Pages that are no longer on your website but others are linking to it.
- Pages that return a non-200 status code.
- Expired pages.
Let’s talk about them and how to fix them.
Pages That Are No Longer on Your Website but Others Are Linking to It
It is very common to get these kinds of orphan pages and there is really nothing much you can do about it. Since you don’t have control over this link, the best thing is to reach out to the site owner and ask them to update the link. Another thing you can do is to make a page with the same topic but with that old URL.
Pages Returning a non-200 Status Code
Google might still find some of these pages on your pages even if they have been corrected. These status codes are often used to address errors on your site. After fixing the page with the issue, you don’t have to do anything as google would stop crawling these pages eventually.
Expired Pages
Expired pages are very common with some websites. How do you fix this? Well, all you have to do is nothing as google should stop crawling these eventually too.
How to Fix Unexpected Orphaned Pages
These unexpected orphaned pages are a possible cause of concern in the modern world today. Before you can grow your website with organic search traffic, you need to address these issues. These issues are critical factors for success when working with SEO.
There are five different types of orphan pages like this. These pages are;
- Expired pages still returning content.
- Pages that are left out from a previous site migration.
- A syntax error while generating sitemaps.
- A syntax error while generating canonical tags.
- High-quality important pages that are not linked in your website structure.
Those are the types of orphan pages you should be concerned about.
Expired Pages Still Returning Content
Some websites can simply stop linking to expired contents which may include products removed from the catalogue and ail to return a status code. What the status code indicates is that the content doesn’t exist and as a result of it, the old page is still available.
To fix this kind of orphan page, all you have to do is to remove links pointing to expired content. In addition to it, you should make sure to update the expired page with the proper status code. You should use a 404 or 410 status code if the content is no longer available.
Pages That Are Left Out from A Previous Site Migration
These are pages that are not redirected and as a result, old content might still e available. To fix this kind of orphan page, you should redirect these old URLs to similar pages on your website. If there are no similar contents, then these pages should return a 404 or 410 status code.
A Syntax Error While Generating Sitemaps
These kinds of pages create an erroneous URL that can still create a duplicate and return contents or HTTP errors. To fix this, if you find any erroneous URL created by a syntax error, you should get with your development team to debate a solution.
A Syntax Error While Generating Canonical Tags
Like the first syntax error, this creates erroneous URLs that could be served a 200 OK status code or error code. If you spot these kinds of URLs, you should get in touch with your development team to debate a possible fix.
High-Quality Important Pages That Are Not Linked in Your Website Structure
Many websites today use navigation pages like a list of contents and categories that easily help users to find what they are looking for on the website. The problem with this is that these navigations or categories are only met when several criteria are met.
Whether it becomes an error of automation or not, there are a lot of cases in which we might neglect linking to high-value pages as bloggers or website owners. The right approach to fix this is to determine when a page ceases to become a relevant target or organic traffic and delete it according to the business criteria. You should remove all links and use the proper status codes (How to fix orphaned page).
Conclusion
The conclusion to all this or the point we are driving at is that we make our website a high-value website to search engines. We are not going to achieve this by having orphan pages on our website. Orphan pages are really bad for SEO and we should learn how to fix them.
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