Fix Orphaned Content

Google follows links in order to know the existence of a page, and then determine if your page worth rank on the SERP. Adding the internal link in each of your pages might sounds simple. But when your site grows and have more and more new pages, you might missed some of the pages behind.

What is Orphaned Content?

Orphaned content is a content page on your website that doesn’t received any contextual link from other pages. This including both external link (other website) and internal link (your own website).

The link here must come in the form of contextual link, wrapped in a sufficient text around it. So, if your page has only received link from the homepage, header, or category page, it still counted as orphaned content.

This is because, Google value contextual link more than other type of link since it the text around contextual link provide Google a clue of what is the link about.

What Does Orphaned Content Impact to the SEO?

When there is no contextual link that pointing to a specific page, the search engine have a hard time to find that page and know it existence.

Search engines follow links and save all the content they find on pages in their index. Orphaned content has few meaningful internal links from other pages or posts to it. Therefore, Google will consider this type of content less important than other content that does have lots of links to it.

There is no harm done in the SEO value to the whole site. It is just that your effort of creating that specific post will not get you any value since the search engine does not recognize it.

On the other hand, when you fix the orphaned content, you’ll benefit it by adding more page to be recognized by the search engine.

How is Orphaned Content Existed?

Orphaned content exist when the webmaster create a post, publish it, and forget about it. They might forgotten to link back to this page when creating another new post.

This is a common issue and faced by most of big websites. The larger the number of post a website have, the harder to maintain the healthy internal link structure.

Fixing Orphaned Content

Step 1: Identify and List Down All The Orphaned Content

Our favorite ways to identify orphaned content is by using Ahrefs. Ahrefs is free to use only if you’re the about to view your own website’s report. This can be done by connecting your account to the Google Search Console account to verify that you’re the web owner. Here are the steps:

1. Go to Site Audit.
2. Click + New Project.
3. Click on the URL sources tab and check Backlinks as a URL source in addition to the default settings.
4. Click Continue, follow the instructions to complete the setup, then run the crawl.

When the site audit is complete, export all internal pages from Page Explorer and save them. Then, go to orphan pages.

From here, you’ll find all the orphan pages that did not received any contextual links.

If your website is huge, you’ll be surprised on discovering how many orphan pages that your site have and how much you can improve your site SEO by fixing all of them after reading this module.

Step 2: Determine The Value of The Orphaned Pages

Now that you have the list of all the orphaned pages on your site. It is time to determine the value of it.

We have the action plan breakdown according to the value:

1. If there is any duplicate or similar content that your site have towards the orphaned pages.

Action: you might want to merge them into the other page and delete the orphaned page.

2. If you think the page might still valuable to your readers and do not have any duplicate content around your site.

Action: un-orphan the page by adding internal links into it from your other pages.

3. If the page has a poor quality and received no backlink from other site.

Action: you might want to consider to just delete it since it is not adding any value to your website.

4. If you found that the specific page contain a poor quality but the page actually received some backlinks from authority sites.

Action: you might want to un-orphan it as well instead of deleting it and lose the backlink value. Improve the content and add some internal links from other post.

If your orphaned pages are falls under condition 2 & 4, you can proceed to the next step. Otherwise, with condition 1 & 3, the solutions end at this step.

Step 3: Adding Internal Link and Un-Orphan The Page

The best practice to add internal link is by adding it into the other related content of yours.

For example, if your orphaned page is about “dog food”, you might want to find the post on your website that is related to “dog” and add the internal link into the “dog food” orphaned page.

Or, you might find use the keyword or topic in the orphaned page and add to the other page on your website that contain that word.

For example, in this module, you’ll find that we add some internal link to the content that explain the meaning of it.

This way, you’ll improve the UX by adding relevant link so that your site visitors will stay longer on your site. Again, the time duration of visitors is one of the signal of page ranking!

You can either add it manually one by one, in which giving you more quality of the link placement, or you can do it in bulk using some paid internal linking plugin. Both ways work good to un-orphan the orphaned pages.