Orphaned Content: Remove, Redirect, or Revive

You’ve put a lot of time and effort into your website. You’ve written blog post after blog post, created product pages, and landing pages, and made sure that all of your content is high-quality and engaging. But there’s one problem: some of your content isn’t getting any love. We’re talking about orphaned content. Orphaned pages on your website with no incoming links should be fixed. Here’s more. 

What is Orphaned Content?

If you’re not familiar with the term, “orphaned content” refers to an orphan page on your website that has no incoming links.

This can happen for a number of reasons—maybe you’ve changed the URL of a page and forgotten to update your internal links, or maybe you published a blog post that didn’t get as much traction as you hoped it would. If you didn’t use internal links to point to that post, it will become an orphaned page.

Orphaned content is a common issue that affects websites of all sizes. In fact, if you have a lot of content on your site, it’s likely that you have at least some orphaned pages. And while having a few orphaned pages isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it can become a problem if you have too many of them.

If you have too much-orphaned content on your website, it can negatively affect your SEO. That’s because Google uses links to help determine the quality of a page.

So, if a page has no links pointing to it, Google will assume that the page is not important, and it will be less likely to show up in search results. In addition, having a lot of orphaned content can make your website seem unorganized and difficult to navigate.

So, what can you do about orphaned content? Here are three options:

Remove Orphaned Content

An orphan web page is not linked to other content on your website. This could be due to a number of reasons, such as poor organization, broken links, or simply forgetting to add links. Regardless of the reason, it’s important to remove orphaned content from your website for a number of reasons. 

For one, it creates a bad user experience. If users can’t navigate your website easily, they’re likely to leave and find a competitor’s site that is easier to use. Additionally, search engines penalize websites with orphaned content because it’s an indication that the site isn’t well-maintained.

And finally, orphaned pages take up space on your server which can slow down your website’s loading speed—another factor that search engines take into account when determining rankings. 

In short, there are a lot of good reasons to remove orphaned content from your website. But how do you find orphan pages? Read on to find out.

You can fix orphan pages by adding links or removing them.

You can review orphaned pages in sitemaps easily by putting the non-valuable page in the trash. This way, it’s not deleted forever, but is no longer public, and won’t be submitted in the sitemap.

The best way to remove orphaned content is by using a tool like Screaming Frog to identify orphan pages. Screaming Frog is a crawler that will scan your entire website and give you a list of all the pages on your site along with their link status. This will allow you to quickly identify which pages have no inbound or outbound links and take care of them accordingly. 

If you don’t want to use a tool like Screaming Frog, you can also do a manual check by going through each page on your website and checking the HTML source code for incoming and outgoing links. However, this method is much less effective and can take a lot longer—especially if you have a large website. 

Once you’ve identified which pages need to be removed, there are a few different options for what you can do with them. The first is simply deleting the page from your server. This is the quickest and most effective option but will result in any traffic that was coming to that page being redirected to your 404 error page.

If you don’t want to deal with traffic being redirected to a 404 page, you can also choose to 301 redirect the page to another relevant page on your website. This is also an effective solution but will take more time to set up. 

Finally, if you have a page that is getting some traffic but isn’t really relevant anymore, you can choose to revive it by updating the content. This option will take the most time but could be worth it if the page is getting a decent amount of traffic.

No matter which option you choose, it’s important to take care of orphaned content on your website. Otherwise, it could negatively impact your SEO and user experience.

Use Internally Linking to Orphaned Content

Another reason why you should remove orphaned content from your website is that it takes up valuable storage space. If you have a lot of orphaned pages on your site, that could quickly add up to a lot of wasted space. And if you’re on a shared hosting plan, that could mean higher hosting costs for you down the road.

So it’s important to keep an eye on your website’s overall size and get rid of any unnecessary files or pages—including orphaned content.

If you have pages on your website that are not linked to other pages, you can use internal linking to help improve the SEO of those pages.

Internal linking is when you link to other pages on your website from within your content. This is different from external linking, which is when you link to other websites from your content.

Internal linking is important for a number of reasons. For one, it helps search engines understand the structure of your website and find new pages. Additionally, it can help improve the SEO of the pages you link to by passing along some of your website’s link juice.

And finally, it can help improve the user experience on your website by making it easier for users to find related content.

If you have pages on your website that are not linked to other pages, you can use internal linking to help improve the SEO of those pages. Here’s how:

1. Find the orphaned pages on your website using a tool like Link Whisper.

2. Find other pages on your website that are relevant to the orphaned pages.

3. Add links from the relevant pages to the orphaned pages.

Link Whisper is a WordPress Plugin that allows you to scan for other pages on your website, that might be closely related for internal linking.

By taking the time to add internal links to your website’s orphaned pages, you can help improve their SEO and make it easier for users to find them. Sometimes, it’s worth writing a supporting article that would have appropriate reasons to link to the orphaned page.

Skyscraper posts, or pillar posts can help with this strategy.

Redirecting Orphaned Content

Another reason why you should remove orphaned content from your website is that it can confuse users who stumble upon it. If someone finds an orphaned page on your site, they may not be able to figure out how they got there or what they’re supposed to do next.

As a result, they could quickly become frustrated and leave your site altogether. And we all know that bounce rates are something we should be trying to keep as low as possible!

If you have pages on your website that are no longer relevant, you can redirect them to other pages on your website using a 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. When a user or search engine tries to access the old URL, they will be automatically redirected to the new URL.

301 redirects are important for two main reasons. First, they help preserve your website’s link juice by passing along any link equity that the old page has. Second, they help improve the user experience by redirecting users to the new, relevant page.

If you have pages on your website that are no longer relevant, you can redirect them to other pages on your website using a 301 redirect. Here’s how:

1. Find the orphaned pages on your website using a tool like Link Whisper.

2. Find other pages on your website that are relevant to the orphaned pages.

3. Set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL.

4. Test the redirect to make sure it’s working properly.

In closing, it’s important to take care of orphaned content on your website. Otherwise, it could negatively impact your SEO and user experience. Use a tool like Link Whisper to find orphaned pages on your website, and then take action to remove them, redirect them, or revive them. Doing so will help improve the overall health of your website.