Orphan page
What it is
No other page on your site links to this page. It is listed in your sitemap, so it exists and can be crawled, but a visitor clicking through your site can never reach it, and neither can a crawler that follows links.
Why it matters
Google uses links to find pages and judge their relevance, so a page with no internal links tends to be crawled less, rank lower and has no link text describing it. AI assistants that rely on search indexes and link-following crawlers are less likely to find it too. Orphans are often valuable pages that dropped out of a menu, or campaign pages that were never linked.
How Asky checks it
In a full-site audit, Asky maps the links between crawled pages, read from each page’s raw HTML; links added by JavaScript are not seen. A page is reported when no other page links to it at all, counting menus, headers and footers as well as content. Only links from pages still in your sitemap count, plus your homepage. A link to a URL that redirects to the page counts for the page. Your homepage is never reported, and pages that answer with an error are skipped. The check runs only when the audit reached every page without blocks or errors, and never in audits of selected pages.
Reported as a warning with high severity.
How to fix it
- Decide whether the page should still exist. If not, redirect it to its closest replacement, or let it answer 404 or 410 and remove it from the sitemap. Removing it from the sitemap alone only hides it from this check.
- If it should stay, link to it from the content of at least three related pages, with link text that describes what it offers. Fewer linking pages is reported as too few inlinks.
- Add it to a hub, category page or menu where it belongs. A menu or footer link alone is reported as navigation-only inlinks.
- If it is linked only from pages missing from your sitemap, such as archive or tag pages, add those pages to the sitemap or link from a page that is in it.
- Run a full-site audit to confirm the page now has inlinks.
Example
https://example.com/guides/pricing-calculator is in the sitemap, but no page links to it. A contextual link from the pricing guide, and from two other related articles, fixes it:
<!-- On https://example.com/blog/pricing-guide -->
<p>Estimate your own plan with the <a href="/guides/pricing-calculator">pricing calculator</a>.</p>