An orphan page is a page that no other page on the same site links to. It is easy to create by accident: a page is published but never added to a menu, a section is redesigned and the old links disappear, or a template stops showing related pages. Nothing looks broken, so nobody notices until the page fails to appear in search.
This article sets out what Google documents about how pages are found and about internal links. Google does not use the word “orphan” in the pages we read, so where we use it, or give our own reading, we say so.
How Google finds a page
Google’s guide to how Search works says there is no central registry of web pages, so Google must keep looking for new and updated ones. It finds pages it already knows, pages linked from a known page, such as a category page linking to a new post, and pages in a sitemap you submit. The Page indexing report help says it plainly: Google needs a way to find a page in order to crawl it, which means the page must be linked from a known page or a sitemap. If the number of URLs in the report is much smaller than your site’s page count, Google is not finding pages, and for missing parts of a site the advice is to make sure they are linked properly.
The rule: every page you care about is linked
Google’s link best practices say that Google uses links both as a signal of how relevant a page is and to find new pages to crawl, and that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. It says there is no magic number of links a page should contain, and that if you think it is too many, it probably is. The sitemap documentation explains what proper linking means: all the pages you deem important can be reached through some form of navigation, whether the menu or links you placed on pages.
A sitemap helps, but does not replace links
The sitemap documentation says that if your pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of your site, and that a sitemap can improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites. It also says that a sitemap helps search engines discover URLs but does not guarantee that everything in it will be crawled and indexed. It adds that on large sites it is harder to make sure every page is linked by at least one other page, so Googlebot may miss new ones, and that new sites with few external links may need one.
Our reading: a sitemap is a safety net for discovery, not a substitute for navigation. A page that appears only in the sitemap is discoverable but gives no signal, through links and anchor text, about how it relates to anything else.
Links Google can follow
Google says that, generally, it can only crawl a link that is an anchor element with an href attribute, and that most other formats will not be parsed. Links inserted by JavaScript are fine if they use that markup. A menu built from scripted click handlers can leave pages unlinked as far as Google is concerned, which is the subject of our article on script-built links.
Anchor text and context
The same page gives anchor text guidance. Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both pages. Generic text such as “click here” or “read more” is its example of what to avoid, and it suggests reading the anchor text alone to see whether it makes sense. For an image that acts as a link, Google uses the alt attribute as anchor text. If the link text is empty, Google can fall back to the title attribute, and if JavaScript inserts the text, the URL Inspection tool shows whether it is present in the rendered HTML. It also advises against cramming in keywords, which it calls a spam-policy issue, and against chaining links next to each other, because readers cannot tell them apart and each link loses its surrounding text.
Finding pages nothing links to
Google’s URL Inspection tool can show, for a URL, the sitemaps that list it and a “referring page”: a page Google possibly used to discover the URL, which may be a grandparent or great-grandparent of a page that links to it. Google adds that an absent value does not mean no referring page exists. The Page indexing report can be filtered by sitemap, but Google notes a URL counts as submitted by a sitemap even if it was also found by crawling, so the filter cannot prove a page is unlinked. Two cautions from the same help page: it can take a week or so for Google to start crawling a new page or site, so a recent page is not necessarily unlinked, and not every URL needs to be indexed, because duplicates and pages with a noindex tag are fine.
A routine we would use, as our reading rather than a Google procedure: compare three lists. One is the pages a crawler reaches by following links from the home page. One is the URLs in your sitemap. One is the pages you consider important. A page in the second or third list but not the first is a candidate. Our beginner guide, how to find pages on your site that nothing links to, walks through it.
Where this fits at Cultured Digital: the discovery step
On our technical SEO page, the first step of the path is discovery: can it be found, with internal links, sitemaps and orphan pages listed. The architecture guide covers internal linking and large website analysis. Related reading: what sitemaps do and do not do and site structure as a strategy decision.