An orphan page is a page on your site that no other page links to. Visitors cannot click their way to it, and search engines may only find it through your sitemap, if at all. To find orphans, compare the list of URLs in your sitemap with the list of URLs your pages actually link to.
| Kind of page | Usual fix |
|---|---|
| Useful page you forgot to link | Link it from a related page or your menu |
| Old campaign or landing page | Redirect it to the closest live page, or leave it out of the sitemap |
| Duplicate of another page | Merge the content and redirect the copy |
| Thank-you or account page | Fine to keep unlinked; leave it out of the sitemap |
Updated
Orphans usually appear after a redesign, a menu change or a deleted blog category. The checker below needs two lists you can export from almost any crawler or site builder: every URL in your sitemap, and every URL your pages link to. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
URLs in your sitemap (one per line)
https://example.com/
https://example.com/services/
https://example.com/services/roof-repair
https://example.com/services/gutter-cleaning
https://example.com/about
https://example.com/spring-offer-2025
https://example.com/contactURLs your pages link to (one per line)
https://example.com/
https://example.com/services
https://example.com/services/roof-repair
https://example.com/about#team
https://example.com/contact
https://example.com/blog/how-long-does-a-roof-last2 orphan pages found out of 7 sitemap URLs.
Copy orphan list
| List | Where it comes from | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Sitemap URLs | yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, or the sitemap index it points to | Index files list other sitemaps, open each one |
| Linked URLs | A crawl export of internal link targets | Start the crawl at the home page only |
| Pages with traffic | Search Console Performance report, Pages tab | Useful extra check for orphans that still earn clicks |
Save each list to a text file, sort both, and comm -23 prints lines found only in the first file: your orphans.
sort -u sitemap-urls.txt > a.txt
sort -u linked-urls.txt > b.txt
comm -23 a.txt b.txt > orphans.txt
wc -l orphans.txtThe first link uses an a element with an href, so it can be crawled. The second only works with a click handler, so a crawler may never reach the page.
<!-- crawlable -->
<a href="/services/gutter-cleaning">Gutter cleaning</a>
<!-- not a crawlable link -->
<span onclick="location.href='/services/gutter-cleaning'">Gutter cleaning</span>Most site builders add new pages to the sitemap automatically but leave the menu to you. Publish a service page, forget to add it to the menu or any other page, and it becomes an orphan the same minute.
Store owners see the same thing with products that left every collection, and bloggers with posts whose only category was renamed.
Pick the page a visitor would be reading just before they need the orphan. A pricing page might link to a refund policy, a service page to its case study. Use words that describe the target, because Google asks for anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant.
They are a missed chance rather than a penalty. Google's link guidance says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. A page with no links gets no context from anchor text and depends on the sitemap to be discovered.
Not reliably. Google says a sitemap helps search engines discover URLs but does not guarantee that everything in it will be crawled and indexed. An internal link from a relevant page is a much stronger hint that the page matters.
Google states it can only crawl your link if it is an a element with an href attribute. A menu that moves people with a click handler and no href can leave pages orphaned for crawlers even though people can reach them.
Only when the page has no value. If it gets traffic or holds useful content, link to it. If it duplicates another page, merge and redirect. Deleting a page that other sites link to throws away those links.
Related: Sitemap checker, Sitemap and robots.txt examples, HTML sitemap generator, On-page SEO checklist, Google Search Console guide.
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