Read your sitemap and the links on up to 200 server-returned pages.
We read /sitemap.xml and its pages. Nothing is saved.
Link graph
Self-links do not count.
No sitemap page in this check was left without a link from another checked page.
Counted among the pages read here, not the whole site.
The indie shelf
This tool stays focused on one job. Other tools by turushan are ready for the next small task.
Straight answers about IndieOrphans: what the result means, what to do with it, and why there is no catch.
No asterisks hiding down hereAn orphan page is a page on your site that no other page on your site links to. It exists, it may be in the sitemap, and a visitor can reach it only by typing the address or arriving from outside. Nothing on the site leads there.
IndieOrphans reads your /sitemap.xml, fetches up to 200 of the pages it lists, and reads the a links in each one. A page is an orphan when no other fetched page links to it. A page linking to itself does not count.
Usually, yes. Google finds pages by following links, and it says a link a crawler can follow is an a element with an href, per its crawlable links guidance. A sitemap can announce a page, but it gives it no context and passes it no authority from the rest of the site. Orphans get crawled less often, rank lower, and are the first pages to fall out of the index.
Some orphans are on purpose: a landing page for one campaign, a thank-you page after a form, a page you share by link only. The rest are pages you published and forgot to link, and those are the ones to fix. IndieOrphans lists every orphan it found with up to three source pages that could link to it.
The result also lists pages that exactly one other fetched page links to, and names that page. Repeated links from the same page count as one source. Such a page is one deleted link away from becoming an orphan, and one source is a weak signal to a crawler. The count covers the pages the check read, so a page it did not read may link there too. The list is a pointer, and it never changes the verdict.
Link to each one from a page where the link belongs: the related article, the category or hub page, the navigation, or the footer. The result suggests source pages, starting with the home page. Then run the check again. A repeat inside the one hour cache window shows the same measurement.
When the page should not exist, remove it, let it answer 404 or 410, and take it out of the sitemap. When it should exist but stay unlisted, take it out of the sitemap and add noindex, so no crawler is told about a page nothing points to.
The check reads /sitemap.xml at the site's root, and up to eight files of a sitemap index, then fetches the first 200 pages listed there. A page outside the sitemap, past the 200th entry, or on another host is not measured. A page that did not answer, answered an error, or returned something other than HTML is listed as not readable, and its links are not counted.
The check reads the HTML the server returns and does not run JavaScript. A link a script inserts later, a link in a form or a button, and a link from an external site are not seen, so a page that only such links reach is listed as an orphan here. Verify one such page by hand before you add links to it.
Yes. No account, no card, no premium plan, no upgrade nag, no hidden paywall. IndieOrphans is free, all of it.
There is no public lookup history. A network check sends the public input needed for that check to its named source. Local file tools process file contents in your browser. Analytics is currently off, so no visit or job data is sent to a tracker. Anything the tool saves for you stays in your browser.
