By Shad Super in Questions —

How Can I Identify Orphan Pages on My Website and Effectively Integrate Them Into My Internal Linking Structure?

Summary

Identifying and integrating orphan pages in your website improves visibility, navigation, and SEO ranking. Orphan pages are those that aren't linked to from other sections of your site, making them hard to find. Recognizing these pages involves site auditing tools and manual checking. Effective integration into your internal linking structure includes strategic linking, usage of breadcrumbs, and creating XML sitemaps. This guide will elaborate further on these steps.

Identifying Orphan Pages

Using Site Auditing Tools

Tools like [Screaming Frog SEO Spider, 2022] or [SEMrush, 2022] can crawl your website and identify pages that are not tied to your internal linking structure.

Manual Checking

A manual audit of your website's structure using a visual sitemap can help spot potential orphan pages. Ensure every page can be navigated to from at least one other page.

Integrating Orphan Pages Into Your Internal Linking Structure

Strategic Linking

Include contextual links on relevant pages that direct to your orphan page. Consider content relevance and potential user journey as key factors when determining where to link from [Internal Link - SEO Best Practices, 2022].

Adding breadcrumbs improves navigation, helps with SEO, and automatically adds internal links to all pages associated with the breadcrumb trail [Understand the structured data breadcrumbs, 2022].

Creating XML Sitemaps

An XML Sitemap lists all your website’s pages and allows search engines to understand and index your website structure better. Ensure your sitemap is updated and includes your orphan pages [Build and submit a sitemap, 2022].

Conclusion

Identifying and integrating orphan pages improves your website's user experience and SEO performance. Use the methods mentioned above to make your website more navigable and increase its visibility for search engines.

References