search engines find orphaned web page

4 replies
It is my understanding that search engines cannot find orphaned web pages. Is that correct? Our site is pretty large (maybe 800 pages) and has not been kept up through the years. We are now trying to clean it up. We know there are probably a number of orphan pages in the site (ie. they are sitting in a folder, but no other pages on the web site link to them). Can the search engines find these pages? We do not want these old, outdated pages found by people or search engines. Thanks!
#engines #find #orphaned #page #search #web
  • Profile picture of the author theIMgeek
    Orphaned pages will not be picked up in search engines, but if somebody else happens to link to them, they will no longer be orphans, and will eventually get listed.

    To ensure that these pages are never listed, you can specifically tell search engines to ignore them (or an entire folder). However, in the case of outdated pages, you might as well just delete them!

    -Ryan
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    • Profile picture of the author osegoly
      Originally Posted by RJP View Post

      To ensure that these pages are never listed, you can specifically tell search engines to ignore them (or an entire folder). However, in the case of outdated pages, you might as well just delete them!
      It may be time to go through the different folders on your site and perform a clean-up by simply removing web pages, which are no longer needed.

      If there are any pages which are no longer needed and are coming up on google searches for example, you could always use a Robots.txt file to block search engines from accessing specific files. You can find more information about this here: Robots.txt Information

      Good luck.
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      • Profile picture of the author casius
        Actually if you are using JOOMLA or DRUPAL or any other CMS system when you can easily find related information about robots.txt which directories to disallow from indexing...
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike P Smith
    If you decide to delete the files, make sure you do have a proper "404" error page, which explanations of what happened and useful links to help your customers. The generic server 404 page tends to be frustrating.

    Setting this up depends upon the server/host/software that you use - a Google search should be able to help you.
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