Orphaned pages are web pages that are not being referenced or linked to by another web page. Orphaned link pages are harder to detect than the other shady practices employed by some webmasters such as meta tags, javascript links, redirected links and robots.txt files.

Impact of orphaned link pages on link exchanges

Webmasters may orphaned link pages to prevent both visitors and search engines from finding links to other web sites. A link to your web site from an orphaned links page is completely useless in terms of search engine rankings, link popularity and increasing traffic through visitors coming to your site through that link.

Detecting orphaned link pages.

There are two (2) main methods of detecting orphaned link pages, browsing the web site or using Google’s search.

The first method involves browsing the web site to try and find the links page where the link to your web site resides. This method is often slow as a web site’s structure is not always well thought out and browsing to the links page can be frustrating when the links section is not obvious.

The second method makes use of Google’s search. Go to Google and type in the URL of the links page into the search box. If one result is returned, it means that Googlebot, Google’s search engine robot, has found the page and therefore is unlikely to be orphaned.