What Are Orphaned Pages in Digital Marketing?

Orphaned pages, in terms of digital marketing, refer to those web pages that are live on your website but are not linked to any other pages within your site. They exist independently making them impossible for a user to discover naturally through site navigation.

These pages lack inbound links, making them practically invisible to search engines. As a result, search engines can't crawl them for indexing, impacting your site's visibility and SEO. Unlike orphaned pages, a well-linked page is recognizable, crawlable, and contributes to a better SEO ranking.

It is crucial to identify and fix orphaned pages, allowing your web pages to be indexed, visited, and improving your website's overall user experience and SEO performance.

Orphaned pages play a consequential role in digital marketing. A site with many orphaned pages can negatively affect your SEO efforts due to their lack of visibility to search engines and users.

On the other hand, properly managing orphaned pages can significantly enhance a site's digital marketing strategy. By linking these pages to appropriate parts of your site, you not only improve your website's navigation but also increase the chances of higher search engine rankings.

Furthermore, these previously neglected pages can now serve as additional paths to conversions, leads, and sales. Effectively reducing bounce rates, enhancing user engagement, and overall, strengthening your digital marketing performance.

Typically, any web page on your site not linked from anywhere else could be considered an orphaned page. For example, a blog post that isn't linked from the blog's main page, a product page not linked from the products list, or a landing page not linked from any marketing campaigns.

Another common scenario is when a page is only linked from a deleted or updated page, turning the previously well-linked page into an orphaned one.

To manage orphaned pages, marketers can use various SEO tools that can help discover and fix these pages by adding internal links, making them accessible, and potentially valuable resources within your digital marketing strategy.