Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to identify orphan pages?
-
I've read that you can use Screaming Frog to identify orphan pages on your site, but I can't figure out how to do it. Can anyone help?
I know that Xenu Link Sleuth works but I'm on a Mac so that's not an option for me.
Or are there other ways to identify orphan pages?
-
DeepCrawl.co.uk is another great resource here. This tool gives a full list of URLs, including number of internal links to each page. Filter this list by "No. links in" = 0, and this will give you a good list of orphaned pages.
Cheers,
Mike | Fresh Egg Australia -
Hi Marie!
Sadly, I don't use Xenu anymore either. Most of the solutions to find orphaned pages are either hit-and-miss manual methods (search OSE, search your server files). Or you could use a method like Agents of Value describes here.
Couple of posts that may help:
1. Find Orphaned Pages From Your Sitemap.xml File with Excel and IIS Toolkit
Requires IIS toolkit, which unless your installing on an external machine, isn't mac friendly
Ian has some great tips here, including:
- Search the server log files for every unique URL loaded over a 6-month period. Compare that to all unique URLs found in a site crawl. People have a funny way of stumbling into pages you’ve accidentally blocked or orphaned. Chances are, blocked pages will show up in your log file, even if they’re blocked.
- Do a database export. If you’re using WordPress or another content management system, you can export a full list of every page/post on the site, as well as the URL generated. Then compare that to a site crawl.
- Run two crawls of your site using your favorite crawler. Do the first one with the default settings. Then do a second with the crawler set to ignore robots.txt and nofollow. If the second crawl has more URLs than the first, and you want 100% of your site indexed, then check your robots.txt and look for meta ROBOTS issues.
3. Supposedly, Webseo has an automated option to find orphaned files, but I haven't used it nor can I vouch for it:http://www.webseo.com/
Hope this helps! Let us know what works.
-
Well, because they are 'orphans', you probably can't find them using a spider tool! I'd recommend the following process to find your orphan pages:
1. get a list of all the pages created by your CMS
2. get the list of all the pages found by Screaming Frog
3. add the two url lists into Excel and find the URLs in your CMS that are not in the Screaming Frog list.
You could probably use an Excel trick like this one:
http://superuser.com/questions/289650/how-to-compare-two-columns-and-find-differences-in-excel
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Why add .html to WordPress pages?
A site I may take over has a plugin that adds .html to the pages. I searched online but I’ve only found how to add it rather than why to add it. Is it needed? If I remove it, I’ll have to be careful with SEO / indexed pages and redirects. The site is running 3.x.x and 90% of the plugins have not been updated in over 5 years including this one. Before I update to 4.7.x, I am trying to understand the landscape (pros / cons) on why something could be used and if I need to find a suitable replacement for it.
Technical SEO | | acktivate2 -
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
Low page impressions
Hey there MOZ Geniuses; While checking my webmaster data I noticed that almost all my Google impressions are generated by the home page, most other content pages are showing virtually no impression data <50 (the home page is showing around 1500 - a couple of the pages are in the 150-200 range). the site has been up for about 8 months now. Traffic on average is about 500 visitors, but I'm seeing very little entry other then the home page. Checking the number Sitemap section 27 of 30 are index Webmaster tools are not reporting errors Webmaster keyword impressions are also extremely low 164 keywords with the highest impression count of 79 and dropping from there. MOZ is show very few minor issues although it says that it crawled 10k pages? -- we only have 30 or so. The answer seems obvious, Google is not showing my content ... the question is why and what steps can I take to analyze this? Could there be a possibility of some type of penalty? I welcome all your suggestions: The site is www.calibersi.com
Technical SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
Where to put Schema On Page
What part of my page should I put Schema data? Header? Footer? Also All pages? or just home page?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3114 -
What's the difference between a category page and a content page
Hello, Little confused on this matter. From a website architectural and content stand point, what is the difference between a category page and a content page? So lets say I was going to build a website around tea. My home page would be about tea. My category pages would be: White Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Team and British Tea correct? ( I Would write content for each of these topics on their respective category pages correct?) Then suppose I wrote articles on organic white tea, white tea recipes, how to brew white team etc...( Are these content pages?) Do I think link FROM my category page ( White Tea) to my ( Content pages ie; Organic White Tea, white tea receipes etc) or do I link from my content page to my category page? I hope this makes sense. Thanks, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0