Orphan page
An orphan page is a page no other page links to, so visitors can't find it by clicking around and search engines may miss it or treat it as unimportant.
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What it is
Pages become orphans when navigation changes, when a campaign page is made and forgotten, or when a new page is published without links from related pages. The menu and footer alone are a weak signal; links from the body copy of related pages carry more weight.
A page reached only from a flow, such as a thank-you page, is fine as long as it is kept out of search.
In Xodia
Xodia's link check finds orphan pages across the whole site, along with broken internal links, links that redirect, vague link text and pages with few internal links. Your AI runs it and adds links from related pages.
The site linking skill tells your AI to link pages to each other in context when it builds them, so new pages don't start out as orphans.
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Related terms
- Anchor textAnchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link, which tell readers and search engines what the linked page is about.
- SitemapA sitemap is a map of a website's pages: for planning, a tree of pages and how they nest; for search engines, an XML file that lists every page a crawler should find.
- Canonical URLA canonical URL is the one address a page declares as its main version, with a link rel="canonical" tag, so search engines combine duplicates under it.