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Why are my pages being reported as Orphan Pages, when they are not?

Understand why your site's pages will be reported as Orphan Pages even though this may not actually be the case

Dania avatar
Written by Dania
Updated this week

What are Orphan Pages?

These are pages deemed not to have incoming internal links; meaning that during the audit, our user-agent (AhrefsSiteAudit) did not see any internal links for these pages. You can read more about this issue here.

Why would pages with incoming internal links be reported as orphan pages?

This happens when pages were found in the sitemap rather than on the website. Hence, we did not click links from any other page to land on these pages. Such is the case, when your settings instructs us to detect sitemaps:

  • By enabling "Auto-detect sitemaps"; or

  • Specifically entering the sitemap URL

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