Last Updated on June 26, 2021 by scottkandh
New bloggers need to know about orphaned content because it will have a profound effect on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
As I was fumbling through one of my posts, I happened to glance at the top of my WordPress menu and noticed something called Orphaned content. My curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to see what it entailed. I was surprised to find out that there were 12 posts that had nothing linking to them. I create a lot of content on my blog, and I try to ensure that there are contextual links to other posts. However, it is extremely easy to create a post, publish it, and it remains unnoticed because it’s orphaned content.
With the use of the Yoast SEO premium plug-in fixing orphaned content can be easily monitored to ensure that you’re staying on top of it.
It may not sound that important, but in the grand scheme of things it’s important because your site structure helps to increase your search engine optimization (SEO). On the Yoast website, there’s a good article that covers Site structure training and helps you to prevent creating orphaned content.
What is orphaned content?
If you have page or post and it’s not getting any links from anywhere else on your website, it is considered orphaned content.
I’ve been blogging for close to a year now and haven’t noticed any articles about orphaned content. Otherwise, I would have been on top of it right away. And for that very reason, my suggestion is to look and see if you have any orphaned content at least once a month (or more).
That way you’ll be able to see what posts or pages are orphaned and build links to them. In site structure this is what makes it possible for your visitors and Google to find information on your blog/website. Now keep in mind that your pins might link to other pages but the key way to ensure that you do not have orphaned material is by providing text links to your pages and posts.
If you spend considerable time on an article, it is obviously important to you. So why wouldn’t you want that information to be found and read. Promote it via adding internal links by looking at posts/pages that have similar content on them.
How is orphaned content created?
You want to ensure that your visitors can find your content. If you write a post, publish it, and move on to another post, it’s very likely that you may not come back to it and add other internal links. If you spend a little bit of quality time to ensure that all of your posts have links from one to another, you’re more likely to getting more traffic to your blog when the search engines crawl your website.
How do you find the orphaned content?
You find the orphaned content by looking at your post overview information with the title called Orphaned content. The number of orphaned files will be in brackets. Once you click on the link called orphaned content, it will drill down to your orphaned content files for you to build the links to those particular files.
One other useful suggestion is to look at your posts that draw a lot of traffic to your blog and put links to those pages/posts at the bottom of the post or within the context where it naturally fits.
Another strategy is to place some of your orphaned content in your cornerstone posts. Because those are your most important posts/pages on your website/blog.
Conclusion: keep a close eye on your content!
It’s very easy to unknowingly have orphaned content on your website/blog. You’re more so inclined to have orphaned content if you have written a large number of posts.
A good article that I’d suggest reading (from Yoast), especially for new bloggers is Site structure: the ultimate guide. It provides a good framework for how to set up your blog.
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