Orphan Pages

What is an Orphan Page?

An orphan page is a web page on your site that doesn’t have any incoming links.

In other words, orphan pages don’t have any internal links and thus are excluded from your site’s navigation. Orphan pages can’t be found by website visitors.

Orhan vs. Dead End Pages

There is another type of web page that is similar to orphan…

Dead end pages are web pages on your website that don’t link to any other internal pages.

Dead end pages will have incoming internal links, but will not link to anything. This means users would need to either go back or leave the site. This clearly makes dead ends a really bad user experience.

Furthermore, crawlers will reach a “dead end” which is bad for crawling and your “link juice” equity.

Buttons, Components, and Navigation Components Solve Dead Ends

It is very uncommon to have dead end pages on your Webflow websites, because as long as you have a navbar or footer, even if you have a single button… You have at least a few links on each page.

That’s why you should not concern yourself with looking for dead end pages on your Webflow build, as it’s very unlikely that you have any.

How Orphan Pages Affect SEO?

Now, because orphan pages don’t have any incoming links, it’s obvious that they can’t be found or visited by anyone!

No internal links linking to any web page means that:

• Users can’t navigate to that page unless someone sends them a full URL
• Crawlers can’t find that web page unless it’s listed in the sitemap

Crawlers Can't Find Orphan Pages!

The biggest SEO issue orphan pages have is that crawlers will definitely not find that page with the most reliable page-finding method search engines use — following links.

That’s why SEO experts spend a lot of time internally linking pages for any bigger website.

Internal linking strategies and structures have to be pre-planned, maintained, and constantly audited to have a healthy, SEO-optimized website.

Orphan Pages are Bad for SEO

Search engines will automatically assume that orphan pages are not important. Because if a page would be important, you would link to it, right?

Search engines assign PageRank for each page you have.

PageRank is basically a score of how many other pages on the internet link to a particular page. Including your site!

Think of it as votes.

The more web pages online vote for your page (linked to it), the more important it is to the world, right?

And if you didn’t even bother voting for yourself… Why would anyone else vote for you?

Orphaned pages, theoretically, can’t get any PageRank. Which makes them irrelevant in the eyes of the search engines.

How to Find Orphan Pages in Webflow?

To find all orphan pages, you will need SEO crawling software to find pages that you forgot to link to on your Webflow website.

Most Webflow SEO professionals use different tools that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars each month to do that.

But like always, there are free ways to do it, especially if you just need to check, fix, and be done with it.

Use SEO Crawling Software to Find Orphan Pages

Both Screaming Frog and Ahrefs have free plans that allow you to run small technical SEO audits that will find orphan pages.

If you pick Ahrefs, you can create a free account and connect your website via Search Console.

This will allow you to get audits, keywords, and similar information about your website.

If your Ahrefs audit shows an “Orphan Page error”, you will see which pages have no internal links to them.

Make Sure You Link to All Orphan Pages You Found

The last step is simple. Link to orphan pages!

It’s important to note that you should consider linking to an individual orphan page more than once, depending on the actual importance of that page.

Furthermore, keep in mind that search engines can assign different link values to contextual and navigational internal links.  

Webflow Specific Orphan Page Scenarios

Now that we know how to find and fix orphan page issues, it’s time to look at the most common situations that happen… Well, because of how Webflow works.

This way we will be able to avoid orphan pages when building or growing Webflow websites.

CMS Collection List Limits Can Lead to Orphan Pages

If you use CMS Collection Lists in Webflow, you can set item limitations.

Setting CMS Collection List limits is a very easy way to have orphan pages on your website.

If not immediately, then eventually.

While some designers might love this kind of control, most websites grow and expand as time progresses. Any successful website needs more pages, more content, and more CMS collections to grow search traffic.

This means new internal links will be needed. New internal links will be created automatically if there are no limits on CMS Collection Lists.

Setting limits on any link block lists that rely on CMS Collections is the most common way how orphan pages are “born” in Webflow.

Pagination?

And before you ask, no - pagination is not better. Well, it is, but it then adds duplicate page issues instead, so…

Try avoiding limiting CMS item counts or using pagination whenever possible.

CMS Load?

You might be thinking… CMS Load instead?

No - Finsweet CMS Load attribute doesn’t solve this either. Crawlers don’t see links that appear after user interaction, because they are not loaded during initial page load.

In other words, CMS Load doesn’t add those hidden items to DOM during the initial page load.

They appear only after scrolling down or interacting with the button. And crawlers “don’t actually interact with your page”.

So crawlers can’t see things that were not presented in the DOM during the initial page load.

Just Avoid Limits

Ideally, never create rules for CMS Collection lists that prevent items from not showing up.

Navbar and Footer Navigation

For smaller Webflow websites, especially those that don’t use any CMS Collections, it is likely that orphan pages happened because they were not added to navigation components.

If you don’t want to add these links to navigation, be sure to find a way to link to them in page body content.

This can be a button in some section or even a simple hyperlink in any paragraph.

Intentional Orphan Pages

Now that you learned about the SEO downsides of having orphaned pages, let’s look into situations where orphan pages are… Intentional.

Usually, different professionals with different backgrounds work on Webflow websites. These teams might need web page types that are not linked anywhere.

And these teams can decide to make orphan pages by choice.

To understand why, let’s think about the single value that orphan pages offer.

Users can start from an orphan page, but can’t accidentally find that page.

Why Would You Want a Page That Users Can’t Find?

It only would make sense to intentionally make orphan pages if there is a clear user flow in mind, where orphan pages serve as starting points, and traffic is sent to those pages directly.

And that traffic doesn’t come from search engines organically.

Because as a user, you can only go forward from any orphan page, you can’t “stumble upon” that starting page by accident.

And in most cases, you will not find those “starting pages” on search engines either.

Intentional Orphan Page Types

Common intentional orphan page types are:

• Custom offer pages that will get traffic from ads or social media
• Duplicate pages for marketing campaign A/B testing
• Duplicate pages for different user segments
• Duplicate pages for different traffic sources
• Etc.

If that’s the case and your orphan pages have been created intentionally, there are things you need to do.

Disclaimer: search engines don’t like orphan pages because they make no UX sense and orphan page tactics have been abused by black-hat SEOs in the past. Try to avoid them, at all costs.

SEO Tips for Intentional Orphan Pages

If you created orphan pages intentionally, make sure you let crawlers know you don’t want them crawled and indexed:

• Make sure the orphan page has a canonical tag toward a better version of this page
• Make sure orphan pages have no-index tag
• Make sure Disallow: /orphan-page-link is added to robots.txt
• Make sure orphan pages are removed from sitemap.xml

Having at least three of these precautions is enough because removing from Webflow sitemap.xml can be hard or impossible.

Having all four of these precautions in place will make sure that you don’t waste your crawling budget on pages that you don’t want to be indexed in the first place.

Or Link to Them?

Another approach would be to find a way to link to these pages, even if you link to it somewhere once… It’s not an orphan page anymore.

That being said, this way crawlers can eventually index pages you linked to.

Do You Want to Index This Page?

You should make sure that neither of the following SEO issues will happen if this page gets indexed:

• Duplicate content issue: there is another page with the same or very similar content for the same search intent
• Thin content issue: if the page has just a few hundred words or showcases any other thin content features, then indexing it would bring almost no value

Deleting Orphan Pages?

Last but not least, if you delete orphan pages, make sure you 301 redirect them to a better page version. If you don’t have a better version, you can always consider redirecting slugs to your homepage.

This will prevent you from losing any incoming external links from other websites.

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