What is a good way to locate orphaned pages on a website?

What is a good way to locate orphaned pages on a website?

• Login to the CMS and find pages that don’t contain any links in them
• Use the ‘site:’ command in Google to find orphaned pages
• Check Google Search Console for orphaned pages in the pages report
• Crawl the website using an SEO tool and add include XML sitemaps

 

Explanation:

• A good way to find orphaned pages is to:

  1. Crawl your website with an SEO crawler (e.g. Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Ahrefs, Semrush).

  2. Import your XML sitemap(s) into the crawler.

• The crawler compares:

  • Pages discovered through crawling (internal links).

  • Pages listed in your sitemap(s).

• Orphaned pages = URLs present in the sitemap but not found via internal links during the crawl.

 The other options are incorrect or less reliable:

• Logging into the CMS only shows content, not internal linking status.

• The site: command in Google won’t reliably show orphaned pages, as Google may not have indexed them.

• Google Search Console doesn’t directly show orphaned pages in its reports.