<b>Median site has 8.9% orphan pages — and they tank indexation</b>

<b>Median site has 8.9% orphan pages — and they tank indexation</b>
We diffed full crawls against sitemaps + analytics on 156 domains to count URLs with zero internal inlinks.

— Orphan share, median: 8.9% ▓░░░░░░░░░
— Orphan share, p90: 24.6% ▓▓▓░░░░░░░
— Indexation rate of orphans: 34.0% vs. 89% for linked

Orphans index at roughly a third the rate of linked pages — the single largest indexation delta we measure. The biggest source wasn't deleted nav; it was paginated and faceted URLs that lost their only inlink when a component re-rendered.

Note: a page in the sitemap but with no inlink is still functionally orphaned to the link graph.

So what: orphan rate is a top-3 audit KPI. Every orphan is a URL you're asking Google to value with zero internal vote behind it.