Why it matters to a buyer
Orphan pages are common on sites that have been redesigned, migrated or grown over several years, because a page can remain live and even be submitted in a sitemap while every link that once pointed to it quietly disappears from navigation and content over time. For a buyer, orphan pages are lost investment: content that took real effort to create is effectively invisible to normal site visitors and gets crawled far less often, even if it is still technically indexed.
How it is measured or applied
Orphan pages are found by comparing a full crawl of the site's internal links against a full list of live URLs, from the sitemap, the CMS, or server logs, and flagging any URL that exists but receives no internal links. Each one is then either linked properly from relevant related content, if it is still valuable, merged into a page that already ranks, or removed and redirected if it no longer serves a purpose. This check is repeated after major redesigns or content migrations, since those are when orphaning usually happens.
Sources
- Build and submit a sitemap, Google Search Central
