WordPress Orphaned Content – How to Find and Fix?

WordPress Orphaned Content

Search Engine Optimization is one of the biggest concerns for any website owner. If you have a WordPress site, there are several steps that you can follow to ensure the best SEO outcomes for your site and content. Orphaned content is probably a term you have heard in connection to SEO best practices. In this article, we will discuss more about WordPress orphaned content, how to find it, and how to fix it.

What is Orphaned Content?

Inter-linking of content is a big differentiator in content strategy. Google and other search engines determine the relevance of a piece of content through the contextual links coming to it. These links could be from your own domain or from external domains. External linking could be a different type of effort, but internal linking is a straightforward process that can be easily managed by content creator. Now, when a post or page on your site has no internal links to it, it is called Orphaned Content. There could be links to a new page or post from the sitemap, as well as from category or tag pages, but if there are no contextual text links, these posts or pages can be considered orphaned content.

Orphaned content on your site could have serious implications as they are not easily recognized by search engines as relevant content. As a result, they may not be indexed, and your content’s visibility potential could be affected. So, in order to make sure your content is recognized, you should ensure relevant internal linking from other content in your site. This will ensure better structure and visibility for your content.

How to find WordPress orphaned content?

You can find orphaned content in your WordPress site manually. For this, you need to create a list of all the content available on your website. Then, you need to crawl the site, and find out all the content that is not indexed. Now you can compare both the identify the content that is not indexed and those won’t have internal links.

This process could work if your site is new, and you have only a handful of content to fix. For bigger sites, with large volumes of content, this could be a hectic process. However, in such cases, you can use a unique plugin called Link Whisper, which will help you identify WordPress orphaned content, and assists you in better link building.

The process of finding orphaned content with Link Whisper free plugin

Step 1Install and activate the plugin. You can install the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository and activate it. If you are a beginner, check our article on How to install and configure a WordPress plugin.

Step 2View the Link Report to gain information on internal links for each post. The report gives information on inbound internal links, as well as internal and external links for outbound links. The posts which have 0 inbound internal links will be considered orphaned content. Also, you can modify the information displayed in the Report from the Screen options.

Step 3Customize the link suggestions on the Settings page. There are options to select a language and specify the post types and term types that you would like to create links for. In addition, you can choose to ignore numbers, and specify the words that need to be ignored. You can also delete all the data associated with Link Whisper from the Settings page.

How to fix orphaned content on your WordPress site?

Once you identify orphaned content, you can link to those articles from other relevant posts and pages. If you are using a plugin like Link Whisper, you will get automatic link suggestions, which you can customize in the Settings page.

Premium features of Link Whisper

With the premium version of Link Whisper, you will be able to manage several other advanced options as well. Some of these are as follows:

  • Option to add multiple links simultaneously with anchor texts selected.
  • Easily add internal links to old posts that are considered to be orphaned content.
  • Modify links to your posts from the Reports page itself.
  • Option to edit sentences, urls and anchor texts from the plugin settings itself.
  • Automatic linking to a specific keyword list.
  • Change links in bulk.
  • Check and fix broken links.
  • Connect with another site using Link Whisper, and get suggestions for links.
  • Ignore urls or categories to avoid them in suggestions.

Best plugins to help you with internal link building

Other than Link Whisper, there are a few other plugins that you can consider to ensure proper internal link building. Here are some of our picks:

Yoast SEO

Yoast is one of the most popular options when it comes to SEO. With the premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin, you will get access to an additional column in your Posts overview section for Orphaned Content. You can simply click here to view all the posts on your site that have no internal links to them. This will enable you to link these articles from relevant posts that are existing. In addition, Yoast SEO offers well-analyzed suggestions for related posts while creating content on your site. Also, the internal linking blocks will help you create a hierarchical link structure on your store.

Interlinks Manager

This plugin offers several dedicated tools to optimize the internal linking strategy for your website. You will be able to view a comprehensive overview of all your internal links along with information on visits generated from those links. It also assesses link juice and automatically suggests related links when you are creating a new piece of content. The plugin also helps in converting keywords into internal links or add references to products you are selling on the site. Furthermore, it is fully compatible with the WordPress block editor, and lets you specify the block to apply automatic linking.

Internal Link Juicer: SEO Auto Linker for WordPress

This one of the best options in the WordPress repository that will help you automate the internal linking strategy on your store. The plugin helps you diversify anchor links and enhance relevant linking efforts on your site. You can configure a set of keywords and links will be built automatically. Moreover, the plugin has several customization options such as pre-defined template tags, and option to get the number of links per page and url. Overall, this plugin is extremely user-friendly, and ensures the best SEO outcomes for your site.

Internal Links Manager

This is another free plugin that will help you with automatic internal link building in your site. All you have to do is specify a keyword and url, and when that keyword is used in your content, the link will be created. You can set multiple keywords, and also increase the number of times the link will be displayed in an article.

WordPress Orphaned Content
This is a simple plugin that will help you automate internal linking.

We hope this article has provided you with a decent understanding of WordPress orphaned content, and how you can find and fix it for better search engine optimization. If you have any doubts in handling orphaned content on your WordPress site, leave us a comment in the below section.

Further reading

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