# Why IndieOrphans exists

> A sitemap can name a page that the rest of your site never links to. IndieOrphans finds that gap.

By turushan.

Published: 2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z

Updated: 2026-09-08T00:10:27Z

Canonical: https://indieorphans.com/blog/why-indieorphans-exists/

A sitemap and an internal link answer different questions. A sitemap tells a crawler which pages a
site wants discovered. An internal link gives people and crawlers a path to reach a page from the
rest of the site.

Google recommends that every page you care about has a link from at least one other page on your
site. A page can still appear in a sitemap while receiving no such link. That is the gap
IndieOrphans checks.

Enter a site. IndieOrphans reads its sitemap, fetches up to 200 pages, and collects the ordinary HTML
links between them. It lists the sitemap pages that no other checked page links to. The result links
back to the exact sitemap it used.

The answer has limits. Links added only by JavaScript are not visible. Pages missing from the
sitemap are outside the check. A failed page can hide a link, so the result says when its graph is
partial. There is no account, card, premium plan, or public record of what anyone checked.

If the graph starts from an unexpected inventory, [validate the sitemap and its sampled page responses](https://indiesitemap.com/) before adding links based on that inventory.

Read [the limits of the fetched link graph](https://indieorphans.com/#which-pages-and-links-does-the-check-not-see). Use [IndieOrphans](https://indieorphans.com/) to find sitemap pages with no inbound link from another successfully fetched page.

## Sources

- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/overview