WordPress SEO in 5 mins – What is orphaned content?

WordPress SEO In 5 Mins – What Is Orphaned Content?

Content creation is only half the marketing process – for people to discover your content, search engines must find and index it first. How do they do that? By linking web pages. But at times, some pages escape linking, making it unnoticeable by the search engines. In SEO, “Orphaned content” is the term used for such unlinked content. Our experts from Perth explain everything you need to know about orphaned content: what it is and why is it significant in SEO?

What is orphaned content?

In simple terms, it is any content that isn’t linked from another webpage. Since nothing points to this content, both visitors and Google find it hard to discover it.

For pages and posts to be discovered on a website, they should be connected via internal linking. Linking, in this case, means contextual linking in posts rather than a link from the homepage or the sitemap. If a page is linked from the categories but not with text linking, it will still come under orphaned content. This is so because text links are more valuable since they provide context for the visitors and the search engines.

How does orphaned content get created?

Orphaned content is often a by-product of a lot of information and less emphasis on link building. Since linking is dependent on the topic of your blogs, it can be difficult to find related content that you can use to build a linking structure. Though having orphaned content is understandable, it becomes a negative factor when people cannot discover your content.

Why should you care about orphaned content?

The number of links pointing to a piece of content is a mark of its value. If you do not link to a post on your website, Google will see it as non-quality content. A page that is not linked will be deemed a non-quality page which would make all the effort you put into creating that page futile.

Google has many criteria to decide if a page should rank in the SERPs and how high its rankings should be. Relevance, authority, and user experience are among the predominant ranking factors. When Google finds content on your pages that do not provide any value, it could adversely affect your ranking. Therefore, all orphaned content on your site should be redirected, removed, or revived.

Should you fix your orphaned content?

Whether you should fix or leave orphaned content as it is, depends on its relevancy. If your blog posts were important in the past but have no significance anymore, you can let them remain as it is. Posts regarding events, particular activities and announcements come under this category. SEO plugins like Yoast can help. The plugin allows you to remove the content, hide it from the search engines, or update it if you wish to do so.

How to prevent orphaned content?

You can prevent your content from being orphaned by linking to it appropriately. Linking the content from various parts of your website will make it easily discoverable for the search engines and your audience. If the articles that link to the content have considerable traffic, this content will also be more visible. However, it is important to ensure that you do not go overboard when attempting internal linking. Make sure you only link content that is related and relevant.

When your website has a lot of posts, you might end up creating orphaned content inadvertently. However, with good linking practices and removing posts that do not add value to your website, you can significantly diminish the negative impacts of such content.

For any queries on content creation and SEO, reach out to us at sales@computingaustralia.group or through our Contact us page.

Jargon Busters

Link: A hyperlink, also known as a link, refers to an image, video, or textual content that a user can follow by tapping it.
Linking structure: A hierarchy of interconnected links in your website is called a linking structure.