TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What is orphaned content?
- Does orphaned content have any effect on SEO?
- How do you find this type of content?
- How do you fix it?
- Let us know
- References
About Shashi Charles
“I am a healthy food lover – and tricking my loved ones into eating their veggies disguised as treats is my specialty! I am also a graphic designer by day and blogger by night and a mom 24/7!”
Shashi is an author at Honest Cooking.
What is orphaned content?
Blog posts and pages that aren’t internally linked within your own site are called orphaned content. These orphaned posts and pages that reside on your website are not linked to any other internal posts/pages or external ones. In order to fit into a site’s structure, posts and pages need internal links. Internal links help content to be more findable to Google (and other search engines), as well as users on your website.
Do keep in mind that orphaned pages/posts are not not crawled or indexed at all. In fact, Google and search engines crawl these pages and index them. Although these orphaned pages and posts exist on the web, there is no link (other than a site map) that links them to your website. These pages, therefore, are sort of ignored by the website and they become “orphaned content”.
Does orphaned content have any effect on SEO?
Google and other search engines follow links and save all this and more on pages in their index. As orphaned content isn’t linked from other pages/posts on your site, search engines will consider this content less important than other content that has several internal links.
As search engines consider orphaned content less important, they will not rank this orphaned content high in search results. This could mean less traffic to those posts and pages, no matter how great the content might be.
Orphaned content can also have a negative effect on the entire website. Google and other search engines often discredit entire websites because of the existence of orphaned content.
How do you find this type of content?
Off the top of your head, you might have an idea of a few posts and pages that do not have any internal links to them that you can easily fix. However, this would not be the most effective way to find orphaned content. These two programs can easily help.
- Yoast SEO Premium Plugin: If you have the Yoast SEO Premium plugin on WordPress, then the orphaned content filter will be one of the tabs under your posts. You can click on the “Orphaned content” tab to find all the pages and posts on your website that do not have any links to them. Once you have that list, you can start adding internal links to those posts and pages by adding links to other posts on your website that are relevant to that content.
- SEMrush: If you have a SEMrush account, then you can use SEMrush to find and fix any orphaned content. They have a detailed blog post that walks you through this and that can be accessed here.
How do you fix it?
Fixing orphaned content is simple. You just need to add the link to that content to another page or post it on your website. For example, say you have a post for chicken curry that is on your Yoast orphaned content list, you could add a link to that post on a recipe you may have for yellow rice or flatbread and talk about how well they pair together.
Be sure that once you’ve corrected your past orphaned content within your old content that you create an internal linking strategy for all new pages and posts. Once something goes live you want to immediately link it into another post so it’s not orphaned.
Let Us Know
We hope this helped you to better understand orphaned content on your site and how you can solve these issues to perform better on Google and other search engines. If you have any questions or thoughts on Orphaned Content please feel free to comment below!