Unreachable Pages

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Hi All

Is there a tool to check a website if it has stand alone unreachable pages?

Thanks for helping

[Bryan_Loconto]

If the page is indexed you can just place the site url in quotes "www.site.com" in google and it will give you all the pages that has this url on it.

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

But I want to find the stand alone pages only. I don't want to see the reachable pages. Can any one help?

[KeriMorgret]

Do you mean orphaned pages without any internal links to them? Or pages that are giving a bad server header code?

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

pages without any internal links to them

[ThompsonPaul]

The only way I can see accomplishing this is if you have a fully complete sitemap generated by your own website's system (ie not created by a third-party tool which simply follow links to map your site)

Once you have the full sitemap, you'll also need to do a crawl using something like Screaming Frog to capture all the pages it can find using the "follow link" method.

Now you should have a list of ALL the pages on the site (the first sitemap) and a second list of all the pages that can be found through internal linking. Load both into a spreadsheet and eliminate all the duplicate URLs. What you'll be left with "should" be the pages that aren't connected by any links - ie the orphaned pages.

You'll definitely have to do some manual cleanup in this process to deal with things like page URLs that include dynamic variables etc, but it should give a strong starting point. I'm not aware of any tool capable of doing this for you automatically.

Does this approach make sense?

Paul

[Joseph-Green-SEO]

Thanks Paul! Is there any way to do that for another persons site, any tool?

[ThompsonPaul]

The only possible way I can think of is if the other person's site has an xml sitemap that is accurate, complete, and was generated by the website's system itself. (As is often created by plugins on WordPress sites, for example)

You could then pull the URLs from the xml into the spreadsheet as indicated above, add the URLs from the "follow link" crawl and continue from there. If a site has an xml sitemap it's usually located at www.website.com/sitemap.xml. Alternately, it's location may be specified in the site's robots.txt file.

The only way this can be done accurately is if you can get a list of all URLs natively created by the website itself. Any third-party tool/search engine is only going to be able to find pages by following links. And the very definition of the pages you're looking for is that they've never been linked. Hence the challenge.

Paul