ORPHANED CONTENT

Orphaned content is content that doesn’t get any links from other posts or pages on the same website. As a result of that, this content is hard to find for both Google and site visitors.

Posts and pages need internal links to them to fit into a site’s structure and to be findable. Note that links in this case means: contextual links. If other content is linked to from the homepage, sitemap, or category and tag pages, but lacks text links, it’s still considered orphaned content. The reason for this is that text links provide both users and search engines with context and therefore, add more value.

Orphaned content affect your SEO

To rank your content, Google obviously needs to know about it. Search engines follow links and save all the content they find on pages in their index. Orphaned content has few meaningful internal links from other pages or posts to it. Therefore, Google will consider this type of content less important than other content that does have lots of links to it. So, if an article is important to you, you should make that clear to Google (and your visitors). Make sure to link to that specific article from other related content.

Create an orphaned content

If you write a new blog post, publish it and then forget about it, you probably won’t link to it anymore in your new posts and pages. Is this a bad thing? Well, of course, this depends on the blog post. But it is definitely a bad thing if you want people and Google to find this post. By not linking to a page or post, most people will not be able to reach it and you’ll end up with orphaned content.

Prevention is better than cure

If you want to prevent your content from being orphaned, you need to make sure to link to that content. Linking to it from other places on your website will help Google and your audience reach it. Linking to it from articles that generate a lot of traffic in the search engines will boost the visibility of this content even more. But you’ll need to be mindful of which content you want to link most to, as you won’t be able to do this with all your content. In addition, it’s always important to keep these internal links relevant and not just link everything to each other. However tempting that may be.

Should you always fix it?

For some articles, it isn’t that important to fix an orphaned content status. Some blog posts are only important for a short period of time. At Yoast, we sometimes write about events that are coming up. Announcing such an event makes for a great blog post, but such a post probably has less value next year. It’s no problem for these kinds of posts to remain orphaned. In fact, perhaps you should consider deleting these pages (properly of course!) altogether. That’ll clean up your site a bit.