An SEJ reader sent us the following SEO question, which which I decided to discuss with our readers:
What is an orphan page and dead-end page? What’s the difference? How are they harmful for your site?
An orphan page is the one that is not linked to by another one of the site (i.e. that cannot be reached from anywhere on the site) and thus cannot be found by a search bot unless it is linked to externally. It can occur deliberately (when a webmaster creates a “private” page to show to someone but not to public, for example) or accidentally (in this case it’s a web development/ design mistake).
While there are plenty of myths that, once discovered by a search bot, such web page may be classified as a doorway page and by this cause penalty to the whole site. I’ve personally never experienced that penalty myself and don’t believe that it can happen but if you have another experience, please share.
The worst thing about orphan pages is that they are useless for SEO as they can’t be seen by a search bot.
A dead-end page is the one that has no outgoing links, thus creating a “dead end”. It is definitely not a best case as, first, it’s unnatural (a web page should be connected to other pages, hence its name) and, secondly, it leaves both the robot and the visitor no other choice accept abandon the site: they have no way to go.
With template-driven sites it is quite difficult to create a dead end (you always have links in a sidebar, footer or banner). A common case of a dead end is a 404 page: therefore it should be optimized to include links to home page and important site directories.
Hi Ann,
I cann’t understand this article. Because it was confused about an orphan page and dead-end page.
404 Error Documents, while useful for people, in most cases won’t be indexed by the search engines (which automatically discard any page that sends a 404 status code).
A few years ago it was commonplace to redirect 404 traffic to either the root URL or HTML sitemap page for a site to help people find content, but the search engines were unable to handle that technique properly. It made too many duplicate ghost images, causing frustration and concern for both search engines and Webmasters.
Template-driven sites may actually create large numbers of orphan pages, as a site with thousands of autogenerated pages may not include a staggered linking structure (such as is found with blogs) that helps connect all the pages together.
A good example of such architecture that is in widespread use is forum software. Many forum packages create profile pages for people who register. The majority of registered users don’t participate in the discussions and the chances of their profile pages being crawled and indexed are greatly diminished, especially if they don’t log in.
Robots.txt and sitemap.xml, which category they are into?
yes, it is difficult to understand with me
I could understand your page easily. Others find it difficult maybe they are not really in SEO.
Robots.txt and sitemap.xml are those file setup my webmaster to inform the Search Engine like Google to follow its search path easily.
Just think of its kind of simple map for Google to understand your “town-ship” layout.
For dead end page I suggest blocking it from robots and orphan page I think redirection would be better
To block pages you may create a robots.txt file or else you might also want to give instructions to the search bots from within the meta tags. Both solutions work :)
every page should have basic site links to prominent content in a navbar somewhere on each and every page unless there is good reason to not have such
I arrived at this page because I was trying to find information on intentionally orphaning a page once it’s been indexed. I’ve created a sitemap page with links to everything on my site, but because it would have such negative page rank, I was planning to nofollow all links to it, once it has been indexed. Based on what you said about doorway pages, I’m assuming this is a BAD strategy? :)
@Andrea, why would you want to do that anyway? I mean if you consider the page to be not too useful why create it at all?
@Ann I think it’s a good page to have simply to ensure there is a link to all content, somewhere. I’ve had my blog for 3 years, and have a TON of content.
I know an XML Sitemap meets some of these needs, but I believe there’s benefits to human site visitors as well.
@Andrea, so is it about visitors or crawlers? If that’s visitors you are doing that for, why wait until it’s indexed. Just do it :) No worries about Google – this way it won’t benefit your SEO but it won’t harm either, I guess.
Hi Miss Smarty,
I understand your pages fine, for the others I suggest they check out my SEO glossary : ), I admit orphans and dead-ends escaped my attention. Don’t these lost and forlorn pages find a home in supplemental purgatory in the end ?