How bad to have orphan pages on site?

Pages not linked are bad? Why?

[silverbytes]

I need to put some unlinked pages to send users by email such a newsletter page. I'm not intersted in that page to be accessed by users or bots.
But does that harm in anyway? I've heard is not good but why?

[arrowman]

I need to put some unlinked pages

Why? Is there a law against linking in your country? :-)

[jim_w]

I never heard that. As a matter of fact I have an entire directory of past newsletters that do not have any links to them. All links to those pages are in emails I send out. I also have a couple of pages with information for potencial clients w/o links. I haven't seen any difference in my (G) rankings.

While I admit to being extremely naive about the ways in which one can manipulate a SE, I can’t think of any reason how a page w/o links could be used to manipulate any SE.

[jo1ene]

It's not bad. It just won't help your site additionally from a SEO standpoint.

[neuron]

I've heard is not good but why?

In your case it is nothing to worry about.

The problem comes from a few years ago when page-cranker generaged doorway pages were common. These were often pages that contained non-sensical content stuffed with keywords, designed to score high in the search engines for particular keyterms.

Let's say you produced a lot of these non-content, keyword stuffed pages, 100 of them, and placed them on your site. You would then need to create a sitemap page for them and link to that site map from your home page or any other spidered page on your site. The problem with these pages is that normally then lacked any menu navigation and were hallmarked by an "Enter Site Here" button.

Thus, because then do not link to other pages on the site, they are "orphaned".

Google has said they can find files on your domain even if those files have no links to them, but I have never seen this to be the case in actuality.

What you intend to do is of no concern, and you have nothing to worry about.

[pageoneresults]

Orphaned pages just won't rank anymore. Years ago they would, these days they won't. If they are just sitting there with no links to or from them, they won't be found.

As stated above, what you are doing is fine. Even if the page is found through some obscure method, it's no big deal. It is a relevant page and I'm sure it doesn't contain the footprint of a machine generated gateway orphan.

[Liane]

I happen to still believe that orphaned pages CAN be a problem. I found one on my site not very long ago and it answered a nagging question as to why one of my current pages wasn't ranking well at all.

I believe (and I may be wrong) that if an orphan has links to current pages and is still indexable by the search engines, it may still be considered a doorway page and earn you some sort of penalty.

If you intentionally have pages without links from your main site on your server which links back to the main site ... and you don't want the SE's to crawl those pages, then use robot text to keep them out.

Has anyone else had recent problems with orphan pages?

[alansmith]

Hi, I have a few thousand old pages on my site that aren't linked anymore. I left them as they were still in search engines and geting traffic. Is this bad?

[edited by: pageoneresults at 8:48 pm (utc) on June 24, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed URI Reference - Please refer to TOS [/edit]