Are Orphan Pages always bad?

[Clay Wimberley]

The new site that i'm about to launch has some orphan pages. Some of them are back-ups or different drafts of files in use. I've heard that google doesn't like orphan pages, but how does google know that you have them if there is no link to them? How and when are you penalized for orphan pages? should i put some sort of do not index code on the page?

[mona]

I've never heard of anyone being penalized by Google for a few orphaned pages. They're considered bad because Google ignores them and so they do not contribute to your site in an SEO sense. They're also loosely associated with doorway pages which Google does frown upon. But I think you need a whole lot of them to invoke a penalty.

[topr8]

you can have as many orphan pages as you like, you cannot get penalised for them as no search engine can find them, so they would not know they even exist.

[Leosghost]

I use loads of em to explain things to clients ..let them see ongoing work etc in "private" pages ..never done any harm I can see.

[Clay Wimberley]

thanks for all your helpful responses.

[silverbytes]

put a meta tag for robots and be happy with your orphan pages!