How to Fix Orphaned Pages in Google Analytics
How to Fix Orphaned Pages in Google Analytics Orphaned pages in Google Analytics are similar to another issue that you may have come across such as portion pages and insight maps. It’s a similar yet slightly different issue.
What an orphan page means is that you have a page on your website that is still live but that page is not linked to the rest of your website. A user can still get to it by going to the address for that page.
So what often happens is you have a page you no longer want to use, you just take away links to that page, but you don’t actually delete the page from WordPress.
We see this happen quite often, actually. However, It’s not best practice. So I’m going to show you how to get rid of these.
There are a few things you want to do. Number one, you want to find the link or the page in question, and I don’t have any here but it’s this same issue.
If you click through to the details page, that’ll have the page URL and then it will say something in the second column about it being an orphaned page.
So you’ll want to go through, and follow the link here and go to that page. Then once you get to a page, I’m just going to navigate to any page here on this demo site, and then go to edit the page.
It should still be live. That’s essentially why it’s an orphaned page. Then over on the right-hand side, you want to just find the little red text that says ‘Move to Trash’ and that will delete that page from your WordPress site.
Then there are two more things you want to do. First, you want to create a redirect and you want to do that because having an orphaned page in Google analytics means that people are navigating to that page straight from Google.
This means that even though you don’t really want to have a page on your website, people are still arriving on it and they’re coming straight from Google. It’s been indexed by Google so you need to create a redirect and send people to a different page.
After this page has been deleted, anybody who tries to go there will get a 404 message. And you can check out our video tutorial on how to create redirects to do that. It’s not difficult and it’s very important.
Finally, the last step after you do those two things is to go to your all-in-one SEO or Yoast SEO plugin, find the XML sitemap feature, scroll down and just update the site map.
Now that that page has been deleted from your WordPress settings. It’s going to make sure that it’s no longer included in your site maps and this should probably take care of two issues––it will most likely take care of both orphaned pages in your Google Analytics and orphaned pages in your site maps.