What Is an Orphan Page?
An orphan page is a page on your website that has no internal links pointing to it from anywhere else on the site, making it difficult for both users and search engines to discover.
Why It’s Bad for SEO
Search engines rely heavily on following links to discover and understand pages. A page with zero internal links might still get indexed if it’s in a sitemap or was linked to externally at some point, but it typically receives little to no internal link equity and can be effectively invisible to anyone browsing the site normally.
How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages
A site crawl tool (like Ahrefs Site Audit or Screaming Frog) can compare your full list of indexed URLs against pages actually discoverable through internal links, surfacing any orphans. Fixing them is usually straightforward: add relevant internal links from related, already well-linked pages, or reconsider whether the orphaned page needs to exist at all.
