Orphan Page Finder

What an orphan page is

An orphan page is a page in your sitemap that no other page on the site links to. A crawler can still reach it, because the sitemap handed it over, but nothing on the site points at it. The page has to earn every visit on its own, and the internal links that would pass authority to it never exist.

An orphan page finder answers one question with evidence: which pages on this site are in that position right now. This one reads the sitemap, fetches the pages the sitemap lists, and builds a link graph out of the HTML that comes back. The answer is a list rather than a score, and every entry on it is a page you can open and read.

How the orphan page finder works

Four steps, and you can stop after any one of them:

1. Verify the site. Add a meta tag, upload a small file, or set a DNS TXT record. Nothing is crawled before one of the three is found.
2. Crawl it. The crawler reads robots.txt, reads the sitemap, then fetches the listed pages one at a time, with a wait between requests to your host.
3. Read the report. The orphan list names every page no other page links to, and beside it the contextual orphan list covers the pages whose only links come from the template.
4. Export and fix. The CSV carries the orphans and the suggested links. You add the links in your own CMS, on your own schedule.

Orphans and contextual orphans

Two lists come out of one crawl and they are different jobs. The first is pages nothing links to at all. The second is pages that do get links, but only from the template: the navigation, the header and the footer, the links that appear on every page of the site. A template link says nothing about what this particular page is about, so the page competes with the weakest pages on the site instead of the strongest.

Most sites that go looking for an orphan page checker find the second list longer than the first. Both are in the report on the free plan, and so is the silo matrix, which counts the links running between your top level sections so you can see which part of the site does the connecting.

What a suggested link contains

A suggestion is a pair of pages: the page the link would come from, and the page it would point at. Beside the pair the report gives you the anchor text, the sentence on the source page that anchor already sits in, a similarity score, and the matched terms, the words the two pages have in common.

The anchor is never invented. It is a phrase that already appears on the source page and matches the target page title or its most distinctive terms, so the link reads like the sentence it is inserted into. A pair you already link, a target that is redirected, noindex or not returning 200, and a pair whose pages carry too little shared vocabulary all stay out of the report.

What this finder will not do

The crawl reads the static HTML your server sends, the same HTML a search engine reads on a normal visit, and it does not run JavaScript. If your site builds its links in the browser, those links are not in that HTML and no crawl can see them. We say that plainly rather than let a link count imply otherwise, and the same limit covers anything behind a login, a cookie wall or bot protection: a page that will not serve to a stranger is named in the report as a failed page instead of being read as an empty one.

Nothing is fetched until the site is proved to be yours, one of three ways: a meta tag in the page head, a small file at a known path, or a DNS TXT record. Until one of those is found, the only request made to the host is the verification check itself.

Free gives you one verified site, crawls of up to 500 pages, 3 crawls a month, both orphan lists, the silo matrix, the first 50 suggestions and the CSV export. Pro at $12 a month raises the crawl to 5,000 pages, 30 crawls a month and every suggestion it finds. Agency at $29 a month crawls 20,000 pages a time, 100 crawls a month across 15 sites.

Sign up free, verify one site, and run the first crawl. No card is needed, and both orphan lists are in the free plan.