Orphan Pages

mrpotato

mrpotato

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I’m looking for a way to discover and solve orphan page issues. Does anyone have any suggestions? I’m not against manual work here for this. Also, anyone have any results using link whisperer? Thinking about that but not sure on it.
 
@MrMedia I actually tried with Screaming Frog but was unsuccessful. Most likely, I'm running some misconfiguration that's resulting in orphan pages not populating.
 
I think Ahrefs and other basic site audit tools will find these.
 
mrpotato said:
@MrMedia I actually tried with Screaming Frog but was unsuccessful. Most likely, I'm running some misconfiguration that's resulting in orphan pages not populating.
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Screaming Frog is a spider. If you spider your site, it's NEVER going to populate orphaned pages, because by definition they're orphaned and spiders can't find them.

What you could do is take what Screaming Frog does find, compare it to the URLs in your sitemap, and de-duplicate the list (fully remove any URL that appears more than once). Anything left over is an orphaned page.

No spider on the planet is going to find orphaned pages. It'll find everything but orphaned pages.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Screaming Frog is a spider. If you spider your site, it's NEVER going to populate orphaned pages, because by definition they're orphaned and spiders can't find them.

What you could do is take what Screaming Frog does find, compare it to the URLs in your sitemap, and de-duplicate the list (fully remove any URL that appears more than once). Anything left over is an orphaned page.

No spider on the planet is going to find orphaned pages. It'll find everything but orphaned pages.
Click to expand...
Screaming frog finds pages with no incoming internal links
 
MrMedia said:
Screaming frog finds pages with no incoming internal links
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If and only if you feed it a list of your pages from an external source, such as your sitemap or connect it to Search Console, etc. That's what I was suggesting @mrpotato do; compare it against his sitemap. Pure spidering isn't going to get it done. But yeah, I spoke too "definitively". If you fire up a spider without feeding it extra data, it's not going to find orphans.
 
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