Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
I've taken a hiatus from the Zupo Talk & Tea channel just because in California and Orange County we've been having a heat wave kind of come by. And then we had some fires and the fires are actually still going on. So I took about two or three weeks' break, but again, I'm back and we have some more videos. So please expect some more videos moving forward. It was just a small break, we're not done just yet.
But again, today's conversation is, what is an orphan page? And is it good for SEO? An orphan page is more on the technical side of SEO. If you're reading SEO a lot, you may read it here and there. I feel like orphan page is not one of those that is as understood, so we're going to go ahead and talk about that today.
But before we begin, this is Zupo SEO Talk & Tea. I want to introduce the tea we have today. We have a tea and actually this is not from Teavana, this is just an old case that I'm using, but this is a green tea that was gifted to my family from our distant, distant relatives in China.
My father went back to China to go visit the country and he reconnected with some of our clansmen from generations ago. We are about six generations removed from our family ever living in China. So it's pretty cool that he was able to meet his clansmen and have green tea.
But I digress. Let's go ahead and get brewing and get talking. So what is an orphan page? Let's go start there. What an orphan page is, is a page on your website that is not exactly accessible or navigable from the homepage or anywhere else on site.
So, in the sense that most pages on your website can be navigated in some way, shape or fashion, whether that be through the site's menu, main navigation, sometimes if you have blog posts, you go to the main navigation blog, tick click blog posts and all your blogs are there.
Generally all pages can be navigable from the homepage or some other page. Orphan pages are made specifically in the sense that they can not be accessed from anywhere. Sometimes this is accidental, and sometimes this is on purpose. Sometimes when it's accidental, you're just creating a new page and then you forget to include it in your site's architecture. So you're not adding it to navigation. You haven't added any internal links, therefore, no one can really get to it unless they knew the URL.
So the difference is, and I want to focus there, is it's not like the page isn't live. It just means that if the only way someone could access it is if they knew the URL or went directly to that URL. The other way you could do it is they could find it on Google and click directly into that page. The main point is the only way you're getting to that page is directly onto it.
You can do that, like I said earlier, accidentally. Now a lot of companies will do it on purpose, and the reasons are many. Sometimes you want to create a landing page for your paid advertising, and you don't want your normal visitors to access it because for example, you're running a Facebook exclusive deal. So you're running Facebook ads, driving people to that page. You don't want anyone else but those Facebook traffic to access it, so you create an orphan page and then you don't want anyone to access it. So it can be on purpose and not in a bad way.
I think the word orphan has a negative connotation, but you have to understand that there is a way and a flexibility with every strategy. So with orphan pages, they can often be used in a paid advertising sense. Where orphan pages are not recommended to be used, but people still will do it, and sometimes there is value to it, but most of the time there isn't, is when you're trying to rank for multiple keywords and you want the page to rank, but you don't want your normal users to navigate to it.
That is something that a lot of SEOs would do back in the day. That has fallen off mainstream SEO because Google has shown that they don't like that kind of strategy. They don't want you creating pages purely for SEO purposes.
They want pages that rank on their index to be a part of your website's architecture that people can navigate to. They can pretty much tell if you have many orphan pages that people can only navigate to if they knew the URL or it's really difficult to. So in the case, you don't want to use orphan pages too much as an SEO strategy. What I mean by too much, you don't want to create like 15, 30, 50 different orphan pages purely for SEO purposes.
You can create one, two, three, four, five, maybe in that sense of you're just trying and testing, but orphan pages aren't a great long-term strategy. You really need to be having the orphan pages be [inaudible 00:04:43], and the reason why they're called orphan is because they're cut off from the main site. You can't navigate to it. You need to connect the two so that you can navigate it from somewhere on this website.
You can find many ways to do it, just get creative with your main navigation. But in the sense that if we're strictly talking about SEO, because you can use orphan pages for PPC and everything like that. But when strictly we're talking about SEO, orphan pages should be used sparingly. I mainly use them for experimental and testing purposes. And then when we test, we get some results, then blow it up into a whole section of the website.
So, that's what an orphan page is, and that's how it affects SEO. If you're wondering if you have an orphan page, the easiest way is to go onto that page and see if there's any way you can navigate to it. And the easiest way to tell if you can navigate to it is whoever built it, did they add any links type go to that page?
You can use some technical tools like a Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and these other technical tools do that as well. But generally I find that even, I only need those tools to know that if a page is orphaned, you can pretty much usually just tell, but if you want to be 100% sure, users use those tools and they'll be able to be helpful.
So, hopefully that was valuable guys, orphan pages get talked a lot about in SEO literature. And I think it's something that's worth you understanding of what it actually is.
If you guys found the video valuable, please like and subscribe. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment, reach out to us. And I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.