Orphaned Pages
Orphaned Pages are URLs that exist on your website but have no internal links pointing to them from other pages.How it works
Crawlith identifies orphans by comparing yoursitemap.xml with your crawl data:
- Sitemap Discovery: Crawlith reads all URLs listed in your sitemap.
- Crawl Discovery: Crawlith starts from your homepage and follows all internal links.
- Comparison: Any URL that is in the sitemap but was not reached during the crawl is flagged as an orphan.
Why it matters
Orphaned pages present several issues:- Wasted Equity: No internal PageRank flows to these pages, making them much less likely to rank.
- Poor UX: Users have no way to navigate to these pages naturally.
- Partial Indexing: While search engines may discover them via the sitemap, they often treat them as lower priority.
Severity Scoring
Crawlith applies a severity score (low/medium/high) to each orphan:- High Severity: Important landing pages (defined by depth or content) that are missing links.
- Soft Orphans: Pages with only one or two inbound links (configurable with
--min-inbound).
Usage
Enable orphan detection during a crawl with the--orphans flag: