Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. How to identify orphan pages?

    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?

    Technical SEO
    4
    4
    14943
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • MarieHaynes
      MarieHaynes last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Fr3sh3gg
        Fr3sh3gg last edited by

        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

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Cyrus-Shepard
          Cyrus-Shepard last edited by

          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

          2. 4 Tips for Technical SEO

          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. 🙂

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • AgentsofValue
            AgentsofValue last edited by

            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

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • frazashfaq11

              My Website Page Speed is not increasing

              HEY EXPERTS, My website page speed is not increasing. I used the wp rocket plugin but still, I am facing errors of Reduce unused CSS, Properly size images, and Avoid serving legacy JavaScript to modern browsers. you can see in the image Screenshot (7).png I used many plugins for speed optimization but still facing errors. I optimized the images manually by using photoshop but still, I am facing the issue of images size. After Google Core Web Vital Update my website keyword position is down due to slow speed. Please guide me on how I increase the page speed of my website https://karmanwalayfabrics.pk Thanks

              Technical SEO | | frazashfaq11
              0
            • AL123al

              Page Rank Flow

              I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks

              Technical SEO | | AL123al
              0
            • Pete4

              Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?

              I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages.  In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site.  Anyone come across this before?

              Technical SEO | | Pete4
              0
            • Datel

              Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?

              UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.

              Technical SEO | | Datel
              1
            • zenstorageunits

              Sitemap indexed pages dropping

              About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.

              Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits
              0
            • reidsteven75

              How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?

              This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched.  These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory".  The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls.   Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.

              Technical SEO | | reidsteven75
              0
            • Richard555

              No_index of parent page

              Hi, sorry its a Friday question... Page A: www.example.com/house/ Page B: www.example.com/house/kitchen Can I 'no_index' page A without it effecting page B being indexed? Views? Many thanks!

              Technical SEO | | Richard555
              1
            • wparlaman

              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 | | wparlaman
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.