How To Find Orphan Pages Using The SEO Spider
An orphaned page is a webpage that is not linked to internally. So it can’t be found by either a user browsing or discovered by a search engine crawling the internal links of the website alone.
Why Are They Important?
Finding orphan pages is useful because it can help identify areas of a site or important pages that have no internal links. This can obviously be an issue for users, and discovery and indexing of the pages by search engines.
Orphan pages might still be indexed due to being linked to historically or from other sources (like XML Sitemaps, or external links for example), but without any internal links, they won’t be passed internal PageRank, which will impact their scoring and organic performance in the search engines.
How to use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider to find orphan pages
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider to find orphan pages from three sources, XML Sitemaps, Google Analytics, and Search Console.
Note: To crawl the whole website and open up the configuration to integrate with the three sources, an SEO Spider licence is required.
XML Sitemaps:
1. Open Screaming Frog tool
2. Go to menu “Configuration” > Spider > XML Sitemaps
3. select “Crawl Linked XML Sitemaps”
4. select “Crawl These Sitemaps: (this requires a ‘Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml entry), or supply the destination of the XML Sitemap. This means any new orphan URLs only discoverable via the XML Sitemap will be crawled.
5. Type or copy in the website to crawl in the ‘Enter URL to spider’ box and hit ‘Start’.
6. Export Combined Orphan URLs report if you wish to export a combined list of all orphan pages discovered after finish crawling site.
The guide above should help illustrate the simple steps required to find orphan pages using the SEO Spider. For more sources to find orphan pages by integrated Google Analytics and Search Console Google Analytics you can go to visit Screaming user guide.
