Orphaned pages on client's site are ranking, what to do?

[richinberlin]

For whatever reason, my client has presented google with an xml sitemap of 25,000 articles, some really junky, some really good. The junky ones get little or no traffic. its #*$!, thin, hopeless content. But roughly 4,000 of them get traffic. The ones that get the majority of traffic have somehow been found, and gather inbound links.

It makes sense to me to

a. Pick out the best articles.
b. Add them to the site's main navigation.

But I am concerned in doing so, some of the pages are going to lose rankings. One such article gets literally tens of thousands of visitors a month. It's a great article but in addition, has 15 inbound links of quality, and the link juice is hoarded on the page.

I think it will be fine, and overall the site will do better. More people will find the quality articles, they will get more links, these quality articles having more link juice will rank higher...

Just curious what others think.

[lucy24]

Just to clarify: by “orphaned” do you mean that there is no way to find the page, except by a G (or other) search?

:: insert “there oughta be a law” boilerplate ::

[richinberlin]

Literally no site navigation to it.

Eg.
main url = example.com
page in question = example.com/some-page-not-linked-to-anywhere-on-example.com
is listed in example.com/dodgysitemap.xml
Page somehow managed to get found, now has 10 inbound links of quality.

[not2easy]

somehow managed to get found

Umm, it is listed in the sitemap. One of the first basics mentioned in Google's Webmaster Guidelines [support.google.com] is: Help Google find your pages

Provide a sitemap file with links that point to the important pages on your site. Also provide a page with a human-readable list of links to these pages

They also mention there that pages listed in the sitemap should have at least one link from easily found pages of your site. I'd start there and add a link to those pages on a relevant page of your site. Also check to see whether those orphaned pages have a noindex header or meta tag.

As for "link juice" that is a misused concept, think more of overall value than trying to 'direct' the value of link juice.

[richinberlin]

not2easy what I meant was some of them have been found by searchers even though they are orphaned, appear only in sitemaps, and are in very competitive niches. This is what surprises me. That they ranked high enough to get found using just a sitemap with no site links. You've even quoted Google, as saying this is not recommended... and yet they ranked high enough to be found, and now many rank VERY high, higher than the vast majority of the articles on the site that are part of the site navigation.

My client gets more traffic from the orphaned pages, not in its site navigation than it does from its properly linked content pages.

So my concern is by finding parents for these orphaned paged parents, I might cause harm. I am hoping to bring them in, and they do better, but I might bring them in, and they do worse as their hoarded page rank will be distributed. Perhaps overall, average keyword rankings will go from 4 to 3, but I will lose many No.1s?

Happy to hear an explanation of how 4000 orphaned, sitemap only pages, with no internal links, no outbound links, and only external inbound links that bring more traffic than the actual interlinked site pages themselves, are definitely going to do better if I bring them into the site linking structure.

That's what I want to know. If someone has experience with this sort of thing. If you have some specific science on this you can share with me, that'd be great, but I think its probably a bit outside what can be expected to be solved in a reading of Google Webmaster Rules.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Inbound links are only one of many factors that Google (or other search engines) are using for ranking a page.

It's not because a page, has few or no inbound links, that it means it's not ranking well. If the content and its presentation is considered good (based on the ranking algorithm) this is enough. And in the other hand, it's not because a page has lot of inbound links, that it's necessarily rank well. Links are just information, that search engine are mixing in their receipt.

Also, a thin page, doesn't mean a bad page, if the information provided is clear, if it answers a question accurately, there is no reason it doesn't rank well.

[richinberlin]

Yes, I understand short, does not mean thin. and links are not the only factor. I'm after a scientific position on my current challenge if someone has one?

[lucy24]

I’ve encountered this situation as a human user. Search engine points me to a page, I find it useful, spend some time puttering around the rest of the site to see what else they’ve got ... and then when I want to go back to that entry page, I can’t find it for love or money, no way nohow. And, of course, I can’t remember the convoluted long-tailed search query that led me to the page in the first place.

But if your client isn’t interested in repeat human visitors, I guess that doesn’t matter.

[JorgeV]

> I'm after a scientific position

Okay, understood.

[NickMNS]

I'm after a scientific position

Do you count math as science?
You have fundamentally misunderstood how PageRank is calculated.

But I am concerned in doing so, some of the pages are going to lose rankings.

When a page is assigned Page-Rank, that is the rank of the page, link out from that page will not have any negative impact on that page's Page-Rank. Say you have a page and it's page rank is a perfect 1. (measuring page rank in a range of 0 to 1). Adding one link to the page would then funnel that perfect score to the next page, but add two links and now the score is divided by 2. But the source page's Page Rank is not affected.

What confuses me in your question is that you are asking about adding links to these high ranking pages, from the home page and other areas of the site. These are in bound links, thus any page rank assigned to those other pages is currently not flowing to the pages in question, so adding links may in fact boost the rank of the pages.

If these are truly orphaned pages and there also no outbound links, then Page-Rank ends in a dead-end, which should in theory break the algo. To overcome this, Google adds in a "teleport" factor that assumes a probability that the user will go to another site entirely without the use of a link. Given that there are no other links, essentially the Page-Rank is wasted, so it would be preferable for you to ensure that you link "outbound" from the high ranking pages to a other relevant and important area of your site, in order to funnel the Page-Rank, instead of waste it.

Essentially the only way to decrease the page rank of a page would be block or break the inbound links to that page, any other action would have no impact the page's own Page Rank.

Now the above is all fine and dandy, but it is really unclear how importance Page-Rank has an ranking, it certainly still counts for a lot, but other factors can have influence as well. So basically there is really no way to know for sure. The best approach would be to take subset of these pages, make the changes an see what happens, if the outcome is positive proceed with the next batch.

Just remember correlation != causation, and Google is always changing things, one can never be certain that the action taken is the true cause of the measured change.

[richinberlin]

Hey Nick. Thanks for your reply.

Pagerank maths. Yes. Apologies, in referring to "page rank" I was referring not just the page rank, but also the rank of the page, and all possible factors that might be effecting by interlinking. Right now, some possible negative factors are not possible.

a. Orphaned Pages don't link out to other pages of varying topics, blurring the topic focus of the landing page.
b. Orphaned Pages don't link out to other pages of varying quality, possibly sticking them with a thin content penalty.
c. The site has done link buying in the past, not recently, never to the orphaned pages, no warning from Google, but difficult to tell if there is no harm from it. So link quality to the orphaned pages is great, but for the main site - its hard to tell what's good, what's a problem etc

Presently, these orphaned pages are scored in isolation of these issues.

Yes, I want them to have the extra inbound link power of bringing them into the site navigation. That's entirely the reason for this post. I want that, but since these orphaned pages, with less overall links than the main site, with no interlinking, actually bring in more traffic than the main site pages... I have to ask myself the question... is there any risk from changing the status quo? Yes. Point taken. Physical PR won't change. Like you said, its not the only factor.

I will take your advice, and switch 100 in, and A/B/C test them against similar ranking/trafficked pages, 100 B pages, currently linked, 100 C pages, which will remain orphaned.

Thanks for the advice, I will return in due course, with the results.