Rankelle

Page nothing links to

This page is in the sitemap but no other page on the site links to it. Search engines treat unlinked pages as unimportant, and visitors cannot find them by browsing.

How to fix it

Link to it from a relevant page. If it should not be public, remove it from the sitemap.

When it is not a problem

Landing pages for campaigns are orphans on purpose. The question is whether the page is in the sitemap, because a page that is submitted for indexing and linked from nowhere is sending two contradictory signals.

How Rankelle handles it

  • SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
  • DetectionDetected by comparing pages against each other after the crawl finishes, because no single page can show it on its own.
  • GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question.
  • LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
  • VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing.

Try it on your own site, free

No card, and the free tier does not expire — the first verdict takes about six weeks to arrive.