How to Fix Orphaned Pages in Sitemaps
How to Fix Orphaned Pages in Sitemaps This is a fairly common issue actually and what this means is that you have a page or a post on your website and it’s still there.
It’s still active. If you go to your WordPress admin, you can still find the page, but there are no other pages on your website that link to it.
So it has been orphaned. There’s no way to get to it. It’s still, it’s still there though and so what happens as to generate this issue what’s happening is that that orphan pages still being included in your site map, because WordPress is in control of your site map.
So it’s still going into your site map, but nothing is then linking to it and, and you want to get rid of these.
It’s not very difficult. Usually what happens when you see this issue is you just have a page that you don’t really want to use anymore, and you, you don’t link to it, but you don’t delete the page.
That’s very common. Lots of people do that. It’s not the best practice. And this is the reason, this is the result of doing things like that.
But it’s fairly easy to resolve. I don’t actually have any, orphan pages right now, but if you click through and look at the details, It should look similar to this page.
It’ll just be a list of URLs. Essentially We want to do is find a page that is listed, as an orphan URL.
Then you can simply Okay to that page. Let’s just say, this is, I imagine that this has listed as an orphan page.
So you’ll probably see it here. It’ll probably still be active when you try to navigate to it. You can go to the edit page right at the post and then if this is a page that you don’t need anymore on your website and you have no use for it over in the right-hand column, you’ll see this little link, move to trash.
You can just move it to the trash and with WordPress, if you do put something in the trash, you can always find it later.
If you go to the all pages section of, in the admin or the WordPress admin, and let’s say you trash a page, we’re going to trash that commercial services page.
You’ll see up here at the very top, there is trash, and you can click on that and you can see the pages that you have trashed and you can just restore them.
So it won’t disappear forever. If you do that unless you then click to permanently delete it. So that is the solution.
If there is a page that you no longer want to use, if there is a page that you do want to maintain on your website and it’s listed as an orphan page, what you’ll need to do then is just create some links to it.
Again, an orphan page is just a page that has no inbound links to it from other pages on your site.
So just go to a few other pages and put a link to that page. And I suggest doing more than one because if you have a page that has only one incoming link, that will generate another SEO issue.
So I would say either put it in the navigation or put it in a link to it from within at least two to three other pages in your website and that should resolve the orphan pages in your site map.