Will unused/dead pages within my site that is non-linked hurt my seo?

[Marvellous]

For example my website has mysite.com/randomunusedpage.html

No links go into that page from the website but it is published (came with the WP theme). Will that hurt my SEO and should I delete the page or is it harmless?

Thanks

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

No it won't hurt your site, but you are able to block access to those pages via robots.txt. If it's not linked to externally, or via your internal links/sitemap, then you should be fine, but the option is there.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi Marvellous,

Patrick provided you with a great answer. Notice he mentions the sitemap as well, if you’re using an automatically generated sitemap (from Yoast for example) these pages will be included and that way they will get indexed. Besides the option that Patrick mentioned you can exclude them from your sitemap with the advanced settings of the Yoast SEO plugin (assuming you’re using it).

If you want to be sure they aren’t indexed, you can use a site:yourwebsite.com command to view your indexed pages. You can add a text from the pages you don’t want to be ranked for ass well to narrow down the results.

Best regards,

Bob

[Marvellous]

Thanks for the help. I guess it was bad practice on my part to have a lot of unused pages on the website but glad it doesn't have much bad effects.

I used site:yoursite and it returned a lot of the unwanted pages (came with the theme). I've removed them now and will return 404 for now until removed.