Orphaned pages

does Google still index them?

[norton j radstock]

A question -how does Google see your pages if they are in the index but then become orphaned (ie no link from the rest of your site). Do they drop out of the index? If they remain in, are they of value -for example by leaving the links from the orphaned page back to the index page?

I am thinking of things like old news articles that haven't been deleted, for example.

Any thoughts?

[tedster]

It's very likely - though not 100% certain - that completely orphaned pages will be dropped from Google's active indexes. They may well live on forever in some back office record at Google, however. By completely orphaned, I mean no backlinks at all. Not from your own site and not from any other site.

If there's no link in, then outbound links are not likely to do any good, because there's no source for PR to get started. It's like unplugging an extension cord that runs several appliances. Nothing that's plugged into that circuit anywhere along the line will get any juice.

I avoid creating orphan pages. Some attention to creating an archiving scheme can leave those urls with an internal backlink path of some kind. The way I see it, why squander the resources you used originally to create that content?

[Robert Charlton]

I agree that it's prudent to maintain some sort of archiving scheme with a sitemap. That said, I'm not completely sure that Google will completely drop the page, for several reasons.

This is speculation.... Google doesn't like to throw away data. It tends to hang onto deleted versions of pages for quite a while, and (until recently) put them into Supplementals. If a deleted version of a page satisfies a query better than another page, it will still rank. This might possibly be true of previously linked but now orphaned pages as well.

Also... we recently had a discussion about how Google finds pages that have no apparent links to them, suggesting that if you happen to visit one of these pages, it is possible that you'll leave a reference to the page in publicly available server logs that might crawled and get the page indexed. There was also some speculation about the Toolbar causing a page without links to be indexed....

Why is Google indexing my entire web server?
[webmasterworld.com...]

If the thrust of your question is how to keep your pages ranking, by all means make sure you maintain links. If the thrust is whether the page will now be safely hidden, I'd say perhaps, but I wouldn't depend on it.