Search engines
Orphan Page
An orphan page is a page on a website that no other page on that site links to. Because crawlers discover pages mainly by following links, an orphan may go unfound, and even when found through a sitemap it receives none of the internal ranking signals that links pass. Orphan pages are usually accidents left behind by redesigns, campaigns, or removed navigation.
They are easy to create and hard to notice. A landing page built for one campaign, a neighbourhood page dropped from a menu during a redesign, or an article published before a category existed can all end up unlinked while remaining live.
Finding them means comparing the full list of published pages against the pages a crawl can reach by following links. Anything in the first list and not the second is orphaned.
The fix is a link from somewhere relevant: a category listing, a related-content block, or a menu, whichever fits where the page actually belongs.
Why it matters
An orphan page is finished work that produces nothing, because the rest of the site never points anyone toward it.
Related terms
Last reviewed 2026-09-04. All Saige glossary terms.