Which pages can crawlers not reach by a link?
A page listed in your sitemap but linked from nowhere is an orphan. Search engines crawl orphans far less often, so good pages quietly underperform. This compares your sitemap against the links on your home page.
Compares sitemap URLs against the links found on the home page. A bounded preview of internal reachability, not a full link graph.
How this check works
Shipwork reads your sitemap and extracts the links from your home page, then reports sitemap URLs that no link on the home page points to. It is a fast signal, not a full crawl: page two of a large site needs the paid deep crawl to map completely.
What the orphan pages checker compares
The orphan pages checker takes the URLs listed in your sitemap and compares them with the pages it can reach by following links from your home page. The free run reads a sample of up to 20 pages and up to 400 sitemap URLs. It normalises trailing slashes, fragments and the www prefix before matching, so the same address written two ways is not counted twice.
It reports a sitemap URL as an orphan only when the crawl read enough of the site to support the claim. If the pages it fetched are fewer than 80 per cent of the sitemap URL count, it stays silent rather than list pages it may simply not have opened. On a large sitemap this means the check often has nothing to say.
How to read an orphan pages finding
A finding means the crawl could not reach that sitemap URL by following links from the home page, through the pages it read. That is strong evidence of a linking gap, but it is not proof the page is invisible. External links, other sitemaps and direct submission can still lead a search engine to it, and a link on a page the crawl did not read would not have been seen.
A clean result is also bounded: it means every sitemap URL was reachable within the pages and links the run examined. It does not prove that pages missing from the sitemap are linked, and it says nothing about whether orphan pages rank. Use it to find internal linking gaps, then confirm on the live site.
Common causes and why they matter
Orphans commonly appear when a navigation link is removed but the page stays live, when a product or article is only ever linked from a hub that is itself noindexed or unlinked, or when an import adds sources to the sitemap without adding any internal path. Campaign pages and thank-you pages also drift out of the navigation over time.
A page that no link reaches depends on the sitemap alone. Search engines tend to crawl it less often, it receives no internal link authority, and readers cannot discover it by browsing. That is why an otherwise fine page can underperform simply because nothing points at it.
How to fix orphan pages
For each reported URL, decide whether it deserves to exist. If it does, add a contextual link from a relevant, linked page such as a category, an index or a related product. If it does not, remove it and drop it from the sitemap so crawlers stop spending time on a page with no purpose.
Check that your navigation and hub pages are themselves reachable, because an orphan behind an orphan is still unreachable. On a store, link product pages from collections and related-item modules; for articles, ensure every post appears on an index or tag page that is linked. After editing, re-run the check and confirm the count falls.
When to use related checks
Use link graph to see click depth, dead-end pages and pages no link points at within the crawl sample. Use index signals when a page is in the sitemap but marked noindex or canonicalised elsewhere, which is a different conflict.
The orphan page guide walks through finding and fixing them. If you want a complete internal link map rather than a sample, the broader crawl covers more pages; the free check is a fast, honest signal about the pages it read.
Questions
What is an orphan page?
Do orphan pages hurt SEO?
Is this a full link crawl?
What does an orphan pages checker do?
How do I check for orphan pages on my website?
Is the orphan pages checker a full crawl?
Should I link an orphan page or delete it?
Keep reading
What this reads
- Reads public pages from outside your network, the way a crawler does.
- No signup, and nothing is stored on the free checks.
- One of 83 checks across discovery, content, markup, trust and catalogue data.
Cool, just ran an audit and got some insights! Let’s see if I can fix them :)
Whoah! this site is crazy, nothing to roast at all
cool as heck, tried it on my blog and the insights it gave are helpful and not bluff.