<b>Redesign orphaned 600 pages and nobody noticed for a year</b>

<b>Redesign orphaned 600 pages and nobody noticed for a year</b>
Client relaunched. New mega-menu only linked top sellers. 600 older products got zero internal links. Still indexed, still ranking-ish, slowly rotting.
How I found them:
— Crawl the site with Screaming Frog. Export all internal URLs.
— Pull every indexed URL from a sitemap + GSC.
— Diff the two lists. URLs in the index but not in the crawl = orphans.
The fix wasn't "link them all from the footer." That's spam-pattern noise.
— Built a "related products" block on every page driven by category + attribute.
— Added an HTML sitemap as a backstop crawl path.
Watch this: orphans aren't always dead weight. Some were quietly earning. Check traffic before you decide to redirect or revive.