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
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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
Hi everyone! I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page. For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better? Thanks for the help. Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
Technical SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
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 | | Datel1 -
Page titles in browser not matching WP page title
I have an issue with a few page titles not matching the title I have In WordPress. I have 2 pages, blog & creative gallery, that show the homepage title, which is causing duplicate title errors. This has been going on for 5 weeks, so its not an a crawl issue. Any ideas what could cause this? To clarify, I have the page title set in WP, and I checked "Disable PSP title format on this page/post:"...but this page is still showing the homepage title. Is there an additional title setting for a page in WP?
Technical SEO | | Branden_S0 -
How to determine which pages are not indexed
Is there a way to determine which pages of a website are not being indexed by the search engines? I know Google Webmasters has a sitemap area where it tells you how many urls have been submitted and how many are indexed out of those submitted. However, it doesn't necessarily show which urls aren't being indexed.
Technical SEO | | priceseo1 -
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 | | Richard5551 -
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