<b>Infinite scroll turned 12,000 articles into orphans</b>

<b>Infinite scroll turned 12,000 articles into orphans</b>

A news publisher's archive had 12,000 articles. Search Console showed Google had discovered fewer than 1,400. The rest were invisible — not deindexed, never found.

The archive used infinite scroll. Beautiful for readers, a dead end for crawlers. There were no paginated URLs, no <code>&lt;a href&gt;</code> links to deeper articles — just a scroll event firing fetch calls that appended DOM nodes. Googlebot rendered the first batch, found no crawlable links to anything older, and left. Everything past the initial load was an orphan with no path in.

We didn't remove the infinite scroll. We added a parallel, real paginated structure underneath it — <code>/archive?page=2</code> with genuine anchor links — and pointed the sitemap at it. Humans kept scrolling; crawlers got rails.

—Discovered URLs: 1,400 → 11,600 in 7 weeks
—Organic sessions to archive: +210%

Google follows links, not scroll events. If the only way to reach a page is a gesture, that page doesn't exist.