Orphan Pages

Has anyone faced the issue where, crawling a client's e-commerce website that 95% of the landing pages are orphan URLs? To clarify, do all these pages lack internal links pointing to them? Could this indicate a bad site structure? What would be the recommended approach to address this problem? I am considering implementing a "related products" section on each product page.

dang, that's a lot of pages....

onedaydayone said:

To clarify, do all these pages lack internal links pointing to them?

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yes, that's what orphan pages are

onedaydayone said:

Could this indicate a bad site structure?

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not necessarily! The site structure could be good, just the links could be missing...

onedaydayone said:

What would be the recommended approach to address this problem?

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probably restructuring the entire site, but you can start by simply linking up the orphan pages with main / related pages. Sometimes this is enough and if it won't be enough... well... time to re-silo the site

onedaydayone said:

I am considering implementing a "related products" section on each product page.

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it could help, but siloing the site is probably the best course of action for such a high amount of orphaned pages....

By the way, even 95% of those pages are orphaned, most of them are indexed. There are no significant issues regarding visibility in Google's eyes. It's much more interesting to consider how to implement SILOING when the clients are not impressed to create new related blog pages...

onedaydayone said:

By the way, even 95% of those pages are orphaned, most of them are indexed. There are no significant issues regarding visibility in Google's eyes. It's much more interesting to consider how to implement SILOING when the clients are not impressed to create new related blog pages...

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it's hard to say without knowing your client's site and goals. E-commerce is one thing, blogging is a different thing, your client could be OK with 95% of the pages not ranking if those pages are "product accessories" type of pages (that don't give a good ROI should they rank). But it's a totally different thing if the 95% of the pages are blog posts that he was hoping to get traffic (and sales) through, which might justify why your client is not keen on creating more blog posts since the ones he has don't rank yet...

Anyway, we can't know until we see your client's site.... Also, please quote the messages you wish to get answers to, otherwise we will miss them

You might want to look at a plug-in like linkwhisper. It can give you a quick overview of orphan pages and guves you suggestion of links to build to them.

Orphan pages are a classic sign of site structure issues and can hurt your SEO by making content harder to find and index. A 'related products' section is a good start as it creates internal links and pathways for crawlers and users. Consider a full site audit to map out your architecture. Then, create a logical hierarchy, ensuring all pages are accessible through internal linking, such as category and subcategory pages.

If most of the landing pages lack internal links, it could indicate a site structure that needs some fine-tuning. Introducing a "related products" section on each product page is a smart move to enhance navigation and potentially reduce the orphan page count.However, if you're still feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of tackling this issue, consider leveraging a tool like CrawlSpider. With its ability to identify broken links and offer automatic suggestions, it can be a game-changer in optimizing your site's linking strategy. Taking proactive steps like this can go a long way in addressing the orphan page problem and improving overall site performance.

If there are 95% of such pages, then there are big problems in the structure of the website.
Utilize tools like Google Analytics, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or SEMrush to identify all orphan pages on the website. The next step is to rearrange the structure.

You need to rearrange your site and organize your contents. you need to discover relevant products and create internal links

On a Shopify site I noticed bad URL structure, not sure if caused by the theme or Shopify itself.

- Each product would have multiple URLs, once the static original URL but there were also a few ADDITIONAL other URLs for every product

/products/product-name. <-- I consider this the main URL, and should be the ONLY URL

However the site had plenty of these, too, and they were linked like that from many pages on the site:

/products/collection-name/product-name. <-- These had a canonical tag as the "solution" which I considered bad and risky (letting Google choose, which URL)
/products/other-collection-name/product-name. <--- same "solution" as above


Not just the products, the collections also had multiple URLS. Apart from the original, unique URL, on each single product view the corresponding category would be linked with a query string instead of the static URL:

/?category=COLLECTION-NAME (or similar)

I fixed these and a few more odd structural problems. Site traffic doubled within 2 months. As I have the whole SEO for the site (but not other marketing) I believe that organic increase was mostly due to those structural changes, as I haven't done anything else yet.

So I encourage you to fix Shopify URL issues if they are as severe as they were for this shop

onedaydayone said:

Has anyone faced the issue where, crawling a client's e-commerce website that 95% of the landing pages are orphan URLs? To clarify, do all these pages lack internal links pointing to them? Could this indicate a bad site structure? What would be the recommended approach to address this problem? I am considering implementing a "related products" section on each product page.

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Related products can be acheived using a good template. For example, using elementor one can add relevant products to the single product page. But what you need is internal contextual link. I did a complete interlinking of 400+ product website and the results are very promising.

njbox said:

Related products can be acheived using a good template. For example, using elementor one can add relevant products to the single product page. But what you need is internal contextual link. I did a complete interlinking of 400+ product website and the results are very promising.

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May I ask how do you do interlinking?

woguojun said:

May I ask how do you do interlinking?

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I implemented Crawlspider internal link builder plugin to automate the linking. It adds contextual relevant links.