Orphan pages in a C2C Ecommerce website

In this blog post I am going to talk about my experience with SEO “orphan pages” in the C2C Ecommerce platform I work for. I have to highlight that it was one of the most critical and important problems to solve in order to improve the company website’s SEO.

Orphan pages in SEO are pages on your website that have no links to other pages on your site. This can happen when a page is created and then forgotten, or when a link to it is removed, making it difficult for search engines to discover and crawl the page. Orphan pages can negatively impact your website's SEO by preventing search engines from fully crawling and indexing your site.

How to Identify Orphan Pages

1. Use Google Search Console: Google Search Console provides a report of all the pages on your site that have been crawled and indexed. By comparing this report to your site's sitemap, you can easily identify any pages that have been missed and are therefore orphan pages.
2. Use SEO tools such as Ahrefs or Screaming Frog: specially Screaming Frog since can be used for free and is a website crawler that can help you identify orphan pages. Simply enter your website's URL and the tool will crawl your site and generate a report of all the pages on your site, including any orphan pages.
3. Check Your Sitemap: Your sitemap is a list of all the pages on your site. If a page is not included in your sitemap, it's likely an orphan page.

Can you solve orphan pages?

Well it depends. If you want every user’s product page to be indexed and appear on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and even the deleted ones as my company wanted, then the answer is no. The only answer I found was just to reduce the number of orphan pages.

Since we were a C2C platform, users created, edited and deleted their products. The pages showing the links were never left static. The links that led to a product page were updated everytime in a page, which led to the loss of links, and the crawler never getting to the link to the page in the sitemap.

However, you can fix them if you remove the pages users would not want to look for. Therefore I recommend to add in the sitemap links to pages worth to be indexed and searched.

How to Fix Orphan Pages

1. Add Internal Links: The easiest way to fix orphan pages is to add internal links to them. This will allow search engines to crawl and index the page, and it will also provide a better user experience for your visitors.

• Some tasks to do in detail would be:
  1. Create category pages and internally link those category pages.
  2. Pagination and linking to the product pages help a lot.
  3. Optionally, create a popular/trendy products section in your landing page to internally link the product pages that most user would search for.

2. Redirect to Relevant Pages: If an orphan page is no longer relevant, you can redirect it to a relevant page on your site. This will prevent users from landing on a page with no links, and it will also ensure that any link equity from the orphan page is passed to the relevant page.
3. Delete the Page: If an orphan page is no longer relevant and can't be redirected to a relevant page, it's best to delete it. This will prevent users from landing on a page with no links, and it will also prevent search engines from crawling a page with no value.
4. Use optimized and logical url structure. The famous Search Advocate of Google once said:

“For the most part, we treat URLs as identifiers of content.”

John Mueller, Search Advocate of Google

Final thoughts

The Suffering Endless Optimization (SEO) is really painful because it will always say something is wrong and search engines always get updated. You have to continuously work on them.

By identifying and fixing orphan pages, you can improve your website's SEO and provide a better user experience for your visitors. If you're unsure how to identify and fix orphan pages, consider working with an SEO professional who can help you optimize your website and improve your search engine rankings.

Reading from other blogs will help you also:

• How to Find and Fix Orphan Pages (The Right Way)