What’s Orphaned Content material? • yogurt
Marieke van de Rakt
Marieke van de Rakt is the CEO of Yoast. Her main focus is on growing the company. She attaches great importance to maintaining an open and friendly corporate culture. Marieke is also heavily involved in the marketing of Yoast and with the Yoast SEO Academy, the online course platform.
If you want your content to rank on Google, it has to be aware of the existence of that content. This means that you (or another site) need to link to this content. Google follows these links and saves every post or page that it finds in the index via links. So you will understand the importance of adding contextual links to all of your content. This sounds easy, but if you create and publish a lot of content, your link structure may not be the top priority and some of your articles may not get links. Here we explain everything about this so-called orphaned content: what it is, why it is important for SEO, and how to fix it!
Our latest version of Yoast SEO 16.9 includes a brand new SEO workout that will help you find and fix orphaned content on your website. Use This New SEO Workout to Clean Up Your Old Content in 4 Easy Steps!
What is Orphaned Content?
Orphan content is content that is not linked from other posts or pages on the same website. Because of this, this content is difficult to find for both Google and website visitors. Posts and pages need internal links so that they fit into the structure of a site and can be found. Note that ‘links’ in this case means: contextual links. If other content is linked from the homepage, the sitemap, or the category and tag pages, but there are no text links, it is still considered orphaned content. The reason for this is that text links offer both users and search engines context and thus added value.
Why is orphaned content affecting your SEO?
Of course, in order to rank your content, Google needs to know about it. Search engines follow links and store all content they find on pages in their index. Orphaned content has only a few meaningful internal links from other pages or contributions. Therefore, Google will consider this type of content to be less important than other content that has a lot of links. So if an article is important to you, make this clear to Google (and your visitors). Make sure you link to this particular article from other related content.
How is orphaned content created?
If you write a new blog post, publish it, and then forget about it, you will likely no longer link to it in your new posts and pages. Is it bad? Of course, that depends on the blog post. But if you want people and google to find this post, it is definitely a bad thing. If you don’t link to a page or post, most people won’t be able to reach them and you will end up with orphaned content.
Prevention is better than cure
If you want to prevent your content from being orphaned, you need to be careful to link to that content. When you link to it from elsewhere on your website, it can be accessed by Google and your audience. Linking articles that generate a lot of traffic in the search engines will increase the visibility of that content even further. However, you need to be careful which content you want to link to most often, as not all of your content will do the same. It’s also always important to keep these internal links relevant and not just link everything together. As tempting as that may be.
If you’d like to learn more about this, we offer website structure training to help you prevent orphan content from being created. In this course, you will learn how to create the best possible structure for your website. With Yoast SEO Premium you get access to this training course and to all of our other SEO courses.
Where can I find my orphaned content?
Perhaps you have an idea of a few posts that don’t have links to them. However, there is a chance that you don’t have a list of all the orphaned content on your website. Because of this, our Yoast SEO Premium plugin includes two features to help you work on your orphaned content.
The Orphaned Content Workout in Yoast SEO Premium
Without realizing it, you probably have some orphaned pages or posts on your website. There’s no shame we all do. But it’s good to work on it from time to time. That’s why we’ve added a new SEO workout to Yoast SEO Premium that allows you to clean up your unlinked content to make sure people find it.
This workout will help you find and fix your orphaned content in four easy steps! It will show you all of your content that has no links to it and give you suggestions on what to do with it.
The first step in the SEO workout for orphaned content in Yoast SEO Premium
But it doesn’t stop there! After you’ve chosen what to do with your orphaned content, it’s time to work on the content that you want to keep and update. In the next step, we will show you suitable posts or pages from which you can link to your orphaned content. And voila, that’s it. You are done!
The orphaned content check in Yoast SEO Premium
Yoast SEO Premium also comes with an orphaned content check. If you are a user of our premium plug-in, you will find the filter for orphaned content in your post overview:
The orphaned content filter in Yoast SEO Premium
If you click on the filter for orphaned content, you will get an overview of all posts without any text links linked to them. We also have some orphaned articles on yoast.com (blog team, are you reading this? We still have work to do here ;-)).
As I flipped through our own orphaned articles, I became very aware that more recent articles are often orphaned. We just don’t get around to adding links to these articles in our older blog posts. Still, for articles that are important to our SEO strategy or brand, we should be careful to add links in posts that generate a lot of traffic. That helps Google and our audience find these important posts.
Should you always fix it?
For some articles, it’s not as important to fix an orphaned content state. Some blog posts are only important for a short time. At Yoast, we sometimes write about upcoming events. Announcing such an event makes a great blog post, but such a post is likely to have less value in the next year. It is not a problem that such posts remain orphaned. Perhaps you should even consider deleting these pages (right, of course!) Entirely. This will tidy up your website a bit.
Conclusion: keep an eye on this content!
As I’ve shown, it’s easy to unknowingly create orphaned content when you’re posting a lot. Fortunately, you can use the two orphaned content features in Yoast SEO Premium to keep track of things. It’s easy to check which posts and pages are orphaned, and add links to important content so both Google and your users can find them!
Read more: Site Structure: The Ultimate Guide »