Orphan pages are pages your visitors and search engines cannot reach by clicking from your start page, the page your scan starts at (usually your home page). PerfBee now finds more of them, so the Orphan page count of your site can go up after your next scan. Nothing on your site changed: the old count missed two kinds of orphans.
The count is in the Issue filter of Site Pages. The list is in the Technical tab of a detailed scan's report. A fast scan has no orphan list.
What changed
- A page's link to itself no longer counts as a link to it. A page whose only link is to itself, for example in its menu, a breadcrumb or a language switcher, used to look linked. It is an orphan, and it is now listed. The Inlinks count of every page that links to itself drops by one, orphan or not.
- A page that only other orphans link to is an orphan too. If page A is linked from nowhere and links to page B, a visitor who starts at your home page reaches neither. Only A was listed before. Both are listed now. The exported file says which pages have no inlink at all and which are linked only from other orphan pages.
- The list holds up to 10,000 pages. The scan report used to show at most 1,000 orphan pages. It now lists up to 10,000, in URL order. If a scan finds more, the rest are not listed. A List of URLs scan keeps the limit of 1,000 pages.
- A page behind a redirect is no longer listed. The scan report used to list a page that you reach only through a link to an address that redirects. A redirect is not a click, so that page counts as reached now. The list can get shorter as well as longer.
What did not change
Only a page the crawl fetched and read is listed. A scan that stopped at Max pages, or that has a Max depth, did not read every page, so its list can include a page that is linked only from a page the scan never read. A scan with JavaScript rendering Off reads plain HTML, so a page that only a script links to can be listed too. A page that many pages link to (more than 200) is never listed, because the crawl keeps only part of its links and cannot tell that it is out of reach. Crawls of a list of URLs have no start page, so they keep the earlier way of listing. A scan where a Page caps rule dropped pages has no orphan list, because a page that only a dropped page links to would look unlinked. The report of a scan you ran before the change keeps the list it had.
Download the list
On Starter and up, Export on the orphan pages list gives a CSV or Excel file with each page, its status, its inlinks, whether the sitemap lists it and why it is an orphan. The file holds the same list as the report.
How to fix an orphan page
Link to it from a page that is itself linked from your home page, such as a category, a hub page or the menu. If the page is gone, remove it from your sitemap.