Orphan Pages is really harmful to website ranking?

[austinmartin]

I am working on website that has [b]orphan pages [/b](pages that doesn't have inbound link from any pages) so is it really harmful to website?

[piatkow]

The only problem that I can think of is if a page that is orphaned within the site still has quality external links. The worst case scenario would be an unmaintained and possibly forgotten page ranking ahead of the live site.

The major search engines change their algorithms regularly so even if we can give advice that is correct today it may be out of date in a month or two. However I doubt if this scenario would have a detrimental effect on a site's overall ranking.