Why it matters on an HVAC site
Bulk-generated location pages are the classic case. A template creates 340 city pages, the sitemap lists all 340, and the site links to nine of them from a footer dropdown. The other 331 are orphans that exist only because a file was written.
An orphan page is also a tell about how the pages were made. Pages a human meant to publish tend to get linked to; pages a script produced tend not to.
How to check it yourself
- Crawl the site from the homepage, then compare the discovered URL set against the sitemap. Anything in the sitemap and not in the crawl is an orphan.
- Count inbound internal links per URL; anything at zero is an orphan and anything at one is close to it.
- Search Console Links report, where an orphan shows as receiving no internal links at all.
Worked through in numbers
A crawl from the homepage of a contractor site finds 74 URLs. The sitemap declares 412.
The 338 in the gap are service-area pages linked from nothing. Sixty-one of them are indexed, which is why nobody noticed, and their average position across their target queries is 71.
Adding a real service-area index, with the areas grouped by county and each page linked once with a descriptive anchor, is the entire fix. It is also the point at which someone has to decide whether all 338 deserved to exist, and on that site 140 of them did not.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Technical SEO. A page nothing on the site links to.