How to Fix Orphaned Pages in Google Analytics

An orphaned page on your website is one that search engines and users can't find through internal links, effectively making it invisible. These isolated pages can hurt your SEO performance and fragment your user experience, which is why regularly finding and fixing them is a crucial maintenance task. This article will walk you through what orphaned pages are, why they are a problem, and how to use Google Analytics in tandem with other tools to find and fix them for good.

What Are Orphaned Pages and Why Are They an Issue?

In simple terms, an orphaned page is any page on your website that has no internal links pointing to it from another page on your domain. Both users browsing your site and search engine crawlers discovering your content rely on internal links to navigate from one page to another. Without these links, an orphaned page can only be found if someone knows its exact URL or if it's found through an external source like a backlink or a sitemap file.

This isolation creates several significant problems:

• Indexing and Crawlability Issues: If Google’s crawler cannot find your page by following links from another known page, it may never discover it. If a page isn’t discovered, it won’t be indexed, which means it will never appear in search results.
• Poor Link Equity Distribution: Internal linking is how you spread authority (often called "link juice") throughout your website. Important pages gain strength from the internal links pointing to them. Orphaned pages receive none of this authority, making it much harder for them to rank for competitive keywords.
• Negative User Experience (UX): From a usability standpoint, orphaned pages create dead ends. A visitor might land on one from a social media post or an old advertisement, but they have no clear path to discover other relevant content on your site, like your blog, services, or contact page. This often leads to higher bounce rates and missed opportunities.

How to Find Orphaned Pages

You can’t just log into Google Analytics and pull a report named "Orphaned Pages." The process requires a bit more detective work by cross-referencing data from multiple sources. The core logic is to compare a complete list of all your website's known URLs against a list of URLs that a crawler can actually find by following your internal link structure. The URLs on the first list but not the second are your orphans.

Here's a step-by-step method that combines a crawler with Google Analytics to find and prioritize your orphaned pages.

Step 1: Get a Complete List of All Your Website's URLs

First, you need a "master list" of every possible page on your site. There are a few ways to generate this:

• Sitemap URL: Your sitemap.xml file is a good starting point, as it lists the URLs you want search engines to crawl. You can usually find it at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.
• Google Analytics: Export a list of all pages that have received traffic. In GA4, go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens. Set the date range to the last six months to a year, and export the entire list.
• Google Search Console: Go to the Pages report under the "Indexing" section. Here you can see lists of indexed and not-indexed pages that Google knows about.

For the most comprehensive master list, you should combine URLs from all these sources, as each may contain URLs the others missed. Put them all into a single column in a spreadsheet and remove any duplicates.

Step 2: Crawl Your Website to Find All Internally Linked URLs

Next, you need to simulate how a search engine crawler would navigate your site. Tools like Screaming Frog (which offers a free version for up to 500 URLs) or Ahrefs’ Site Audit are perfect for this. Configure the crawler to start at your homepage and have it follow only the internal links it finds. Once the crawl is finished, export the list of discoverable URLs into a separate column in your spreadsheet, right next to your master list.

Step 3: Compare The Lists to Identify Orphans

Now you have two lists: your master list of all known URLs and your crawler's list of internally linked URLs. It's time to compare them.

You can do this easily in Google Sheets or Excel. Let's assume your master list is in Column A and your crawled list is in Column B. In Column C, you can use a formula to check if the URL from Column A exists in Column B.

In Google Sheets, you can use this formula in cell C1 and drag it down:

=IF(COUNTIF(B:B, A1)=0, "Orphan", "Linked")

Filter Column C to show only the "Orphan" pages. This is your definitive list of orphaned URLs.

Step 4: Use Google Analytics to Prioritize Fixes

Your list of orphans might be long, so you need to determine which ones to fix first. This is where Google Analytics becomes incredibly valuable. Return to your GA4 reports (Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens) and use the search bar to look up each orphaned page one by one (or use a Regex filter if you have many).

For each orphaned URL, look at metrics like:

• Views/Sessions: Is this page still getting traffic? If an orphaned page is attracting visitors (likely from organic search, direct traffic, or referrals), it is a high priority to fix.
• Conversions: Has this page driven any conversions? If so, linking to it properly could amplify its success.
• Engaged sessions: Are users who land here staying and interacting? A high engagement rate indicates valuable content that should be better integrated.

Orphaned pages with significant traffic, engagement, or conversions are your top priorities. Pages with zero traffic over a long period are lower priority and might even be candidates for deletion.

Simplifying the Process with Other SEO Tools

While the manual method is effective, dedicated SEO audit tools can automate this discovery process.

• Screaming Frog: The paid version of Screaming Frog can connect directly to your Google Analytics and Google Search Console APIs. When setting up a crawl, you can check an option to find "Orphan URLs" under the "Crawl Analysis" configuration. After the crawl, it will provide you with a neat report showing orphaned pages alongside their analytics data.
• Ahrefs & Semrush: Leading SEO platforms like Ahrefs and Semrush include an "Orphan Pages" report in their site audit tools. They automatically cross-reference crawl data with sitemaps and sometimes Google Analytics to find these isolated pages for you, saving you the manual spreadsheet work.

How to Fix Orphaned Pages: A 3-Step Plan

Once you’ve identified and prioritized your orphaned pages, you need to decide how to handle each one. Don't just start linking to every page, assess its purpose first.

1. Decide the Fate of the Page: Keep, Redirect, or Delete?

Categorize each orphaned page based on its content and purpose:

• Keep It: Is the page valuable, relevant, and unique content? For example, an evergreen blog post or a helpful resource page that was simply forgotten during a site redesign. These should be kept and integrated.
• Redirect It (301): Is the content outdated, thin, or duplicative of another page? Maybe it’s an old landing page for a campaign that is over. These pages should be redirected to a relevant, live page. For example, an orphaned page for a "2021 Holiday Sale" should be 301 redirected to your current main "Sales" page. This preserves any link equity the old page may have.
• Delete It (410): Does the page have absolutely no value, no external backlinks, and no traffic? Think temporary test pages or technical errors. In these rare cases, you can delete it and allow it to return a 404 (Not Found) or, even better, a 410 (Gone) status to tell Google it has been intentionally removed.

2. Integrate Valuable Pages with Internal Links

For the pages you decide to keep, the next step is to "un-orphan" them by adding internal links. Find relevant, high-traffic pages on your site and add a contextual link to the orphaned page. Think editorially: where would a link to this page add value for the reader?

Good places to add links include:

• Within the body of a related blog post or article.
• On a relevant parent category or service page.
• In a website-wide resources hub or topic cluster page.

3. Noindex Pages You Need, but Don't Want in Search

Some pages are intentionally designed not to be navigated to, like "thank you" pages after a form submission or certain internal campaign landing pages. While technically orphaned, they serve a purpose. If you want to keep these pages accessible via direct link but don’t want them appearing in Google search results, add a "noindex" meta tag to their HTML head section:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

This tells search engines not to include the page in their index, resolving any potential SEO issues while keeping the page functional.

Final Thoughts

Hunting down and fixing orphaned pages is an essential SEO health check that improves site navigation for both users and search engines, and helps distribute authority more effectively. By regularly combining data from site crawlers with the performance insights from Google Analytics, you can identify, prioritize, and resolve these issues to create a stronger, more interconnected website.

While manual audits like this are crucial, they often involve hours of downloading CSVs, wrangling spreadsheets, and jumping between platforms just to get a clear picture. We built Graphed to cut out that busywork. By connecting your sources like Google Analytics and Google Search Console in minutes, you can get answers and build real-time monitoring dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. This automates the discovery process, turning hours of tedious analysis into a 30-second conversation and freeing you up to focus on the strategic fixes that matter.