Orphan page finder

Why orphan pages matter

Google’s own guidance on links has one firm rule: every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site.¹ Links are how Google finds most new pages,² and a sitemap does not make up for missing ones — Google describes sitemaps as a help to discovery, not a guarantee of crawling or indexing.³

For readers the case is simpler still. A post nothing links to can only be found from search, a menu or an archive page. Every article that should mention it and doesn’t is a reader who never gets there.

How this finder decides

What counts as a link

Only links inside the body of an article. We read each page’s main content and set aside menus, headers, footers, sidebars and “related posts” blocks. Google itself says it treats those parts of a page separately from the main content, and that links in the writing say more about the page they point to.⁴ (It has also said it does not weight a link by where it sits,⁵ so we are not claiming menu links are worthless — only that they hide orphans: on most WordPress themes, a page in the menu is linked from every page and looks perfectly connected.)

What counts as an orphan

A published page that answers normally, is not marked noindex, is not an archive or category page, is not your home page, and that no other page’s writing links to. This is the same definition our full product uses, so the number here matches the one in the app.

The sitemap comparison

While crawling we read your sitemaps and record which pages they list. That gives two lists: pages your sitemap lists that no article links to, and pages your articles link to that your sitemap leaves out.

Limits

The free scan reads up to 500 pages. On a bigger site, “orphan” means “not linked from the 500 pages we read”, and the result says so. A folder scan (yoursite.com/blog/) only counts links from inside that folder. Pages that only appear after JavaScript runs are not read.

How to read your results

• Orphan pages are listed longest first. Long posts are usually your most complete answers, so they are the best to reconnect first. “In sitemap” means search engines are told about the page even though your writing is not.
• Dead ends are listed most-linked first: they get readers and then end the visit.
• Linked but not in your sitemap is usually a setting in your SEO plugin — a post type or taxonomy left out of the sitemap.
• A very high orphan count on a blog often means posts are only reached through archive pages. That is normal for a new site and the biggest opportunity on an old one.

What to do next

For each orphan, find two or three older posts that already mention its subject and turn a phrase in those sentences into a link. Our guide on finding and fixing orphan pages in WordPress walks through it, and the one on links in your writing versus menu links explains why a menu link is not enough.

To see exactly who links to one page, use the internal links inspector; to see how far buried your linked pages are, run the click depth checker on the same scan. Doing this for every post by hand takes an afternoon per hundred posts — Silotree finds the sentences for you and writes only the links you approve.

How this compares with other free tools

As each tool’s own page described it when we checked on 11 October 2026. Tools change — if a line here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.

Sources

Each one is labelled with how much weight it can bear. Where the evidence is thin, the page says so.

1. Google documentation Google Search Central — Link best practices for Google (updated Dec 2025). Every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page; there is no ideal number of links; anchor text should be descriptive, concise and not stuffed with keywords.
2. Google documentation Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide (updated Dec 2025). Google finds most new pages through links; link text should tell people and Google what the linked page is about.
3. Google documentation Google Search Central — Sitemaps overview (updated Dec 2025). A sitemap helps discovery but guarantees nothing; a well-linked site lets Google find most pages through links.
4. Google, said publicly Search Engine Journal — Google on diluting SEO impact through anchor text overuse (Apr 2025). John Mueller: repeating a link with the same words is normal; menus and footers are treated apart from the main content, and links in the writing say more about the page they point to.
5. Google, said publicly Search Engine Journal — Are internal links in header and footer treated differently? (Mar 2022). John Mueller: Google does not weight a link by where on the page it sits, though it does identify a page's main content.