Orphan page
An orphan page is a page on your site that no internal links point to, leaving it disconnected from your site's navigation and link structure.
Because search engines discover and pass authority through links, an orphan page is hard for crawlers to find and receives no internal link equity from the rest of the site. Even if it sits in your sitemap, it tends to rank poorly because it looks unimportant within your own architecture.
Orphans commonly appear after site migrations, from old landing pages, or when content is published without being linked from any hub or category page. They can also waste backlink value: if an external backlink points to an orphan, that equity has nowhere to flow internally because the page links nowhere relevant in context.
The fix is straightforward. Audit for pages with zero internal inlinks (most crawlers and SEO tools flag them), then either link them from relevant parent pages or, if they are obsolete, redirect 301 them to a live page. Connecting orphans is one of the cheapest internal-linking wins available.