Orphan Page
An orphan page is a page that exists on a site but has no internal links pointing to it from other pages. Crawlers may struggle to discover it, and it receives little internal link equity, so it often performs poorly or goes unindexed.
Why It Matters
Internal links drive both discovery and ranking signal distribution. Orphaned pages miss out on that flow, meaning content you invested in may never get crawled, indexed, or ranked despite being live on the site.
Common Mistake
Relying on the XML sitemap alone to surface orphan pages. A sitemap can get a URL crawled, but without internal links the page still lacks contextual relevance signals and authority, so it rarely ranks well.