Orphan pages have no internal links, so crawlers find them late or never. Compare a crawl's URL set with the sitemap and analytics landing pages. Link orphans from related content, category pages or a hub, and keep the sitemap as a discovery aid rather than the only path.
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Crawl the site from the homepage and export all discovered URLs. Compare with sitemap URLs and analytics landing pages to find pages with no internal referrer.
Check: The diff lists URLs present in the sitemap but absent from the crawl, with their analytics sessions.
Link from relevant pages General best practice
Add contextual links from related articles, category pages or a hub. Use descriptive anchors that match the orphan's topic.
Check: Each targeted orphan has at least one internal link from a page in the same topic cluster.
Confirm discovery
Re-crawl and check that the orphan is now reachable from the homepage within three clicks.
Check: The re-crawl includes the orphan with a click depth of three or less.
If pages are generated from a CMS collection, add a listing or related-posts component that queries the same collection instead of hand-linking each URL.
wordpress
Check that the theme's related-posts and archive templates include every post type; unpublished-in-menu custom post types are a common orphan source.