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.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • 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 find 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 find orphan pages

    Technical SEO
    2
    4
    3130
    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.
    • KJH-HAC
      KJH-HAC last edited by

      Hi all,

      I've been checking these forums for an answer on how to find orphaned pages on my site and I can see a lot of people are saying that I should cross check the my XML sitemap against a Screaming Frog crawl of my site.

      However, the sitemap is created using Screaming Frog in the first place... (I'm sure this is the case for a lot of people too).

      Are there any other ways to get a full list of orphaned pages? I assume it would be a developer request but where can I ask them to look / extract?

      Thanks!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Roman-Delcarmen
        Roman-Delcarmen @KJH-HAC last edited by

        Yes I mentioned in my case I use Semrush and there is a dedicated space for that specific parameter. The easiest way to get your log files is logging into your cPanel and find an option called Raw Log Files. If you are still not able to find it, you may need to contact your hosting provider and ask them to provide the log files for your site.

        Raw Access Logs allow you to see what the visits to your website were without displaying graphs, charts, or other graphics. You can use the Raw Access Logs menu to download a zipped version of the server’s access log for your site. This can be very useful when you want to quickly see who has visited your site.

        Raw logs may only contain a few hours’ worths of data because they are discarded after the system processes them. However, if archiving is enabled, the system archives the raw log data before the system discards it. So go ahead and ensure that you are archiving!

        Once you have your log file ready to go, you now need to gather the other data set of pages that can be crawled by Google, using Screaming Frog.

        Crawl Your Pages with Screaming Frog SEO Spider

        Using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, you can crawl your website as Googlebot would, and export a list of all the URLs that were found.

        Once you have Screaming Frog ready, first ensure that your crawl Mode is set to the default ‘Spider’.

        Then make sure that under Configuration > Spider, ‘Check External Links’ is unchecked, to avoid unnecessary external site crawling.

        Now you can type in your website URL, and click Start.

        Once the crawl is complete, simply
        a. Navigate to the Internal tab.
        b. Filter by HTML.
        c. Click Export.
        d. Save in .csv format.

        Now you should have two sets of URL data, both in .csv format:
        All you need to do now is compare the URL data from the two .csv files, and find the URLs that were not crawlable.

        If you decided to analyze a log file instead, you can use the Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser to uncover our orphan pages. (Keep in mind that Log File Analyzer is not the same tool that SEO spyder)

        The tool is very easy to use (download here), from the dashboard you have the ability to import the two data sets that you need to analyze

        If the answer were useful do not forget to mark it as a good answer ....Good Luck

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • KJH-HAC
          KJH-HAC @Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

          Hi Roman,

          Out of interest, is there an option to expert an orphan page report like there is in Screaming Frog? (Reports / Orphan Pages).

          I guess the true and most realistic option is to get the list from the dev team as using the sitemap isn't plausible as these pages should still get indexed. The new Google Search Console also lets you test individual pages and as long as they're in the sitemap, they should (hopefully) be indexed.

          Still, trying to get a list of ALL pages on a site, without dev support, seems to be a challenge I'm trying to solve

          Roman-Delcarmen 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Roman-Delcarmen
            Roman-Delcarmen last edited by

            Even Screaming-frog have problems to find all the orphan-pages, I use Screaming-frog, Moz, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Raven-tools in my day to day and honestly, Semrush is the one that gives me better results for that specific tasks. As an experience, I can say that a few months ago I took a website and it was a complete disaster, no sitemap, no canonical tags, no meta-tags and etc.

            I run screaming-frog and showed me just 200 pages but I knew it was too much more at the end I founded 5k pages with Semrush, probably even the crawler of screaming frog has problems with that website so I commenting that as an experience.

            KJH-HAC 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

            • Train4Academy.co.uk

              Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only

              reviews pagination crawler disallow

              Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks

              Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk
              0
            • RebekahVP

              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 | | RebekahVP
              0
            • muzzmoz

              Indexed pages

              Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?

              Technical SEO | | muzzmoz
              1
            • MTalhaImtiaz

              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 | | MTalhaImtiaz
              0
            • vivekrathore

              Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?

              My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx.  Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages.  Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.

              Technical SEO | | vivekrathore
              0
            • WebServiceConsulting.com

              Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?

              If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....

              Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com
              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
            • stefanok

              Sitmap Page - HTML and XML

              Hi there I have a domain which has a sitemap in html for regular users and a sitemap in xml for the spiders. I have a warning via seomoz saying that i have too many links on the html version. What do i do here? regards Stef

              Technical SEO | | stefanok
              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
            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.