How to find orphaned pages on your site

Orphaned pages are pages on your site that have no internal links from other pages. Search engines can technically find them via your sitemap, but without internal-link signals they rarely rank. This guide finds and prioritises orphan pages using Webanto Content Intelligence.

1. 1

   Run a fresh crawl of your site

   In Webanto, go to Content Intelligence > Link Health > Run crawl. Select your connected site and start the crawl. For a typical marketing site of 100-500 pages this takes 5-15 minutes.

2. 2

   Open the orphaned pages report

   When the crawl finishes, open the 'Orphaned pages' tab. You'll see every page with zero inbound internal links, sorted by content type. URLs in the sitemap but absent from the internal link graph are the orphans.

3. 3

   Filter by intent

   Not every orphan is worth fixing. Filter for commercial-intent pages first — product pages, service pages, conversion landing pages. These are the orphans that cost you revenue.

4. 4

   Identify 3 candidate source pages per orphan

   For each orphan, click into the detail view. Webanto's AI suggests 3-5 source pages where an internal link would be contextually relevant, with proposed anchor text and the exact sentence the link would sit inside.

5. 5

   Review and approve suggestions

   Click 'Approve' on each suggestion that makes sense. The platform pushes the change to your CMS via API — for WordPress, the post content is updated in place; for Shopify, the article body is updated.

6. 6

   Verify the links rendered

   Open the source page in a browser. Confirm the new internal link appears in the expected sentence, with the proposed anchor text. The link should be in the body content, not appended at the bottom.

7. 7

   Re-crawl after 24 hours and re-check orphan count

   Run a fresh crawl. The fixed orphans should now show inbound links and drop off the orphan report.

8. 8

   Schedule weekly orphan checks

   Enable the weekly link-crawl cron in your account settings. Webanto will re-crawl your site every Monday and surface any new orphans before they accumulate.