Feature Guide

Orphan Page Detection

Find the pages on your own site that nothing links to.

An orphan page is a page that exists on your website but has no links pointing to it from anywhere else on the site. It is still there, it still loads, and the only way anyone reaches it is by typing the exact address or finding it in a search result. Most owners have a few without ever knowing: an old landing page from a campaign, a services page that fell out of the menu during a redesign, a blog post that never got added to the index.

Orphan pages cost you twice. Visitors browsing your site will never stumble across them, no matter how good the content is. And search engines treat links between your own pages as a signal of what matters — a page nothing links to reads as a page you do not think is important, so it ranks accordingly.

Crafty Meerkat finds them by comparing two lists it already has: every address your sitemap declares, and every internal link found while crawling your site. Anything in the first list but not the second is stranded, and appears on your Site Profile page with a link so you can open it and decide what to do.

How it works

During each crawl we read your sitemap (following whatever location your robots.txt points to, not just the usual one) and record every address it lists. We then crawl your site by following internal links from the homepage, noting every link we encounter along the way. At the end, any sitemap address that never appeared as a link on a crawled page is reported as an orphan.

The check is deliberately cautious. If your site has no sitemap, there is nothing to compare against and we say so rather than guessing. If your site is large enough that the crawl reaches its page limit, we skip the check entirely — a page we never reached might be the one doing the linking, and a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer. Your homepage is never reported, since it is the starting point by definition.

Step by step

1
Open Site Profile
Select your site and click Site Profile in the sidebar. If the site has not been crawled yet, click Crawl now — it takes under a minute for most sites.
2
Find the Orphan Pages card
It sits above Page Structure. The description tells you how many of your sitemap pages are stranded, or confirms that every one of them is linked from somewhere.
3
Open each orphan and decide
Click any listed page to open it in a new tab. Ask one question: does anyone still need this page? If yes, link to it from somewhere relevant. If no, remove it from your sitemap.
4
Re-crawl to confirm
After adding the links, click Crawl now again. The page should drop off the list — that is your confirmation the fix worked.

Tips from the den

◆A thank-you page, a private offer, or a page you deliberately keep unlisted is not a mistake — but it should not be in your sitemap either. Take it out and the warning goes away for the right reason.
◆The best place to link an orphan from is a page that is already getting traffic and is genuinely related. A link buried in a footer helps far less than a link inside relevant content.
◆If the check reports that your site has no sitemap, that is worth fixing on its own. Most website platforms can generate one automatically, and search engines use it to find pages faster.

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Common questions

Is an orphan page the same as a broken link?

No, and they are almost opposites. A broken link points at a page that does not exist. An orphan page exists perfectly well — nothing points at it. Crafty Meerkat checks for both.

Will Google still find my orphan pages?

Usually yes, because they are in your sitemap. But being findable and being valued are different things: search engines use links between your pages to judge which ones matter, so a page nothing links to competes at a disadvantage.

Why does the check sometimes get skipped?

Two cases. If your site has no sitemap there is nothing to compare against. And if your site is large enough that one crawl cannot cover it, a page we never visited might contain the missing link — so rather than accuse a page of being orphaned on incomplete information, we tell you the check was skipped.