What Is Orphaned Content?

How do you find orphaned content on your WordPress website? It’s easier than you might think. 😎

Understanding orphaned content

Let’s start by first understanding what orphaned content is and how it affects your site. Orphaned content can be a variety of different things, such as:

• Blog posts
• Pages
• Images
• Videos
• Other media files

Orphaned content can be created for various reasons, such as when links between pages break due to URL changes or when there is an issue with the internal linking structure of a site. This can cause some serious SEO visibility problems because orphaned content affects how Google crawls your website and discovers new information.

Search engines need these links to understand the relationships between different pieces of information on your site so they can provide relevant results for users’ queries. Orphaned content also takes up valuable server space, reducing opportunities for inserting more helpful content into your website, such as videos and images.

Finding and fixing orphaned content in WordPress

Finding orphaned content is rather simple. All you need is the right plugin that will scan your WordPress website for pages and pieces of content not linked from any other page. There are some great solutions out there, but our favorite one is Link Whisper.

Link Whisper is a comprehensive WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your website for search engine rankings by tuning up your internal linking structure and giving you a great overview of where all your links are pointing and how to optimize them even further. This, of course, includes a great feature set to help you solve orphaned content. The plugin will scan your website to find pages with no incoming links. It will also suggest what to do with them, such as linking them to relevant pages, redirecting their URLs to new pieces of content, or deleting them altogether.

👉 To use Link Whisper for this – and after you’ve installed and activated the plugin – go to the Link Whisper’s section in the wp-admin and click on Orphaned Posts:

Once you do that, the plugin will show you all your posts that don’t have links pointing to them from any other posts. Simply click on the Add button next to the post, and have new links added with Link Whisper’s help.

That’s it! 🤩 We recommend prioritizing any pages you decide to keep, as these have the most potential for SEO optimization.

Final thoughts 🧐

Orphaned content can hugely impact your website’s performance and search engine rankings. Fortunately, you don’t need to be an SEO expert to find and fix it – all you need is the right WordPress plugin like Link Whisper.

💡 Regularly scan your pages and fix any content you find to maximize your visibility and user experience. It’s well worth the effort!