When I first heard the term “orphaned content”, it conjured imagery of a lonely child outside in the snow, peering through a house window and watching a happy family enjoy Christmas together in the warmth. Devastatingly sad…but rather apt given what it refers to in SEO and website optimization.
Orphaned content is as it sounds: a piece of content that is separated from the group; no ties or presents under the tree.
In this article, we’re going to define precisely what orphaned content is, how it can impact your SEO, and what you should do to avoid leaving your precious content out in the cold!
What is orphaned content?
In the simplest terms, orphaned content is a piece of content, blog, or web page that is not linked to any other page within your website. As a result, the page is actually rather difficult for both Google and your audience to discover – thus resulting in a very lonely piece of content indeed.
It’s important to note, that even if you have a web page that is linked to from your site map or in the category and tag pages, it’s still considered orphaned if it has no text (or ‘contextual’) links pointing towards it.
Is orphaned content that bad? How does it impact your SEO?
You might assume that having a piece of content on your website that doesn’t have any contextual links pointing to it from other areas of your website isn’t the end of the world. However, it really can have a negative impact on your SEO. Here’s why:
- In order for your content to rank, Google needs to be able to find and identify it with ease.
- Websites that have lots of orphaned content take much longer to crawl and index.
- Content that has no or very few contextual links pointing towards it is considered to be less important and thus less valuable in the eyes of Google.
In other words, if you want every piece of content that you create on your website to rank accordingly, you need to show Google that you value it by taking the time to develop your internal linking structure to include each new piece of content.
Conclusion: Establish good link hygiene
In Conclusion, it’s time for you to establish good link hygiene on your website and start linking internally to every piece of content that you create. This is an important step if you want your online marketing efforts to bear fruit.
- Go back through each post and identify opportunities to link to other pieces (you can find a number of orphaned content identification tools online to save you time).
- Take notes and look for valuable ways to connect blogs. Think about the user experience and what kind of information they could benefit from reading next.
- Focus on building seamless navigation and link contextually to any page or blog post that adds value.
And remember; proper internal linking is not just for Google. Yes, it has a positive impact on your SEO when you make an effort to create an intuitive internal linking structure, however, your primary concern should be with improving the overall user experience. After all, you can increase your online visibility all you like, but if the user experience on your website leaves much to be desired, your conversion rate will suffer for it.
