An Orphan Page is a page on a website with no inbound links. No other page links back to an Orphan page, hence the term “Orphan” is given to these pages.
Also See: What is SEO?
These type of pages serves no useful purpose as they are present on the website but no other page provides a link back to these. As such, no link juice passes on to these pages.
Example of An Orphan Page
A typical example of an Orphan page is given below:
www.seosandwitch.com/thispageisorphan.html
In the example above, if the page thispageisorphan.html receives no backlinks from any of the pages of seosandwitch.com, then the page would be termed as an “Orphan Page”.
Remember this page would be present on the server, i.e if you open the URL directly, it would get open and show its contents but you won’t be able to find this page from any other pages of the website as no link to this page would be provided from those pages.
*The URL used is just for example purpose, no such page exists on the site.
Questions Related To Orphan Pages
Does Google Crawls Orphan Pages?
Probably Yes, leaving the exception that if you have not used robots.txt or meta robots tag to exclude it from the search index.
How Does Google Find Orphan Pages When No Other Pages Link To It?
There are several ways for Google to find your site:
If your site is having sitemap.xml then the Google bot might have found a reference to the page from there.
If your site is in WordPress then WordPress may ping the updates of new posts to several sites, making way for Google crawlers to find it.
What Is The Difference Between Crawling And Indexing?
Crawling means finding a web page with the help of spiders while indexing means including a web page in the search engine index.
