Sitemaps: Orphan URLs

URLs that are only in an XML Sitemap, but were not discovered during the crawl.

Or, URLs that are only discovered from URLs in the XML Sitemap, but were not found in the crawl.

These might be accidentally included in the XML Sitemap, or they might be pages that you wish to be indexed, and should really be linked to internally.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

To populate this filter the ‘Crawl Linked XML Sitemaps’ configuration must be selected via ‘Config > Spider > Crawl’, and post ‘Crawl Analysis‘ must be performed.

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Sitemaps’ tab and ‘Orphan URLs’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit XML Sitemaps‘.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs are found exclusively in an XML Sitemap but were not discovered during a website crawl via internal hyperlinks.

How To Fix

Review orphan URLs and link to them internally from the website if they should rank in the search results.

Remove any pages from the XML Sitemap that should not be indexed and use appropriate directives such as ‘noindex’.