Orphan pages
Pages, other than the home page, that no other page of the site links to. Only checked when the crawl read the whole site. An orphan page can only be found through the sitemap or from outside. Search engines treat a page nobody links to as a page that does not matter much.
WarningLINK-005 · Links · checked once for the whole site
Where it usually comes from
Pages published and added to the sitemap but never linked from a category, a menu or another page — landing pages for campaigns are common.
How to fix it
- Link each orphan from the page it belongs under — its category, or a related article.
- If a page is orphaned because it is obsolete, remove it from the sitemap and redirect it.
How to check it yourself
Pick the page and ask where a visitor would click to reach it from the home page. If nowhere, it is orphaned.
What it looks like in a report
Warning No other page on the site links to this one. · /landing/summer
A campaign page reachable only from the sitemap and from ads. (An example shop; the numbers are illustrative.)
How the audit counts it
LINK-005 is a warning in the links category, and weighs moderately in that category’s score. It is a fact about the site as a whole, so it is reported once, not once per page.
If the finding is deliberate on your site, it can be accepted as intentional in the report. It then leaves the list and the score, and comes back on its own if what it shows changes.
Other links checks
- Too many links on the page · LINK-001
- Generic anchor text · LINK-002
- Internal links without a valid href · LINK-003
- Internal links to dead pages · LINK-004
- Internal links written to another address of the site · LINK-006
- Pages reached by one internal link only · LINK-007
Find it on your site
A Trakis audit runs this check and the other 65 on your site, and tells you on how many pages each one sits. Or go back to all the rules.