ORPHANED PRODUCTS: THE HIDDEN REVENUE LEAK ON ECOMMERCE WEBSITES
- Dan White
- May 28
- 7 min read
Updated: May 29
Orphaned products - the invisible product problem for ecommerce managers and SEO consultants alike.
Most ecommerce stores will unknowingly have products on a website that aren't linked to from anywhere else. It happens for so many reasons but if that’s the case then the product is what we call orphaned. This isn’t just an SEO issue, it’s a commercial one.
What is an orphaned product?
This is any PDP which:
Exists on a website
The URL is live (returns a 200 status code)
Has no other internal links pointing to it
Think of it like sorting out the arrows in Ikea so people can find what what they're looking for. People get lost without them. Truth be told, people get lost even with the arrows so maybe that's a bad example.
Side note - how we handle orphaned products is different to the management of URLs which 404 (ie are not found). It's also different for how we handle out of stock product pages.
While a small number of orphaned pages are completely common, they can cause significant issues at scale and should be regularly managed as part of the maintenance work your SEO team should be carrying out.
What are the consequences of orphaned products?
With enough determination users, Google and other search engines can still technically find orphaned pages, but it makes their job a lot, lot harder. Keeping product pages hidden unintentionally means:
• Reduced internal linking signals – helping a product to rank
• Reduced rankings – helping traffic through to a page
• Reduced sales – fewer people finding your product means fewer people will buy
Does this just affect products URLs?
No. Any URL on a website can be orphaned. That can mean collection pages, blog posts or other static pages can also exist, unlinked, on a site. While it may not lead to a loss of sales as with product pages, the consequences remain the same as they can impact the overall quality of the site as a whole. The solutions which we’ll come onto later on, remain the same.
Why do orphaned products occur?
Orphaned products can appear for a whole host of reasons across stores. The 3 most common reasons I’ve experienced are:
Seasonal products – these become unlinked when their trading season is over. For instance if Christmas gifts are a key line then they may be uncoupled from category pages until the following year
Collection page management – certain collections, can be switched off as trends and business goals change meaning hundreds of PDP’s are unintentionally cut off from the rest of the site. Platform migrations – if a website is being overhauled then what products are connected to which collections will often be overhauled to. It means products can become unintentionally unlinked – but still exist in the system.
Site migrations / Site overhauls – if you’re undergoing a site migration to a new system then it normally means there’s a huge number of other changes which take place including adding new products, scrapping collections or overhauling blogs. All of this can mean certain products can get carried over, but the links that helped you reach them before weren’t.
A Orphaned Product Example
I’ve been working with a ecommerce client recently that deactivated 8 of their collection pages as they no longer felt they needed them.
What happened: Over 300 products that these 8 collection pages were linking to immediately became orphaned as they weren’t linked from any other collections. These products also included a handful of bestsellers.
The SEO consequence: Not having any of these products linked to meant we started to see rankings and impressions drop in the first couple of weeks.
The financial consequence: Some of the bestselling products had a sale price of £1,700 per product. The drop in rankings and impressions translated into a reduction in organic traffic, resulting in far fewer sales than normal.
The solution: We reactivated the collection pages, reconnected the products and resubmitted the collection URLs to Google Search Console to ensure they could be reindexed as fast as possible.
The Impact of Orphaned Products
Let’s split this into three. While orphaned products seem like yet another technical issue for the SEO team to manage the issue real commercial consequences. As marketing and SEO is an investment let’s start with the financial impact…
The impact to revenue:
Inventory sits unsold – literally taking up floor space and/or going out out of date.
Marketing investment is less effective by giving people to a sub-optimial store experience with less choice.
SEO investment is affected, taking time and money to fix the issues which could otherwise be spent elsewhere growing the website
The impact to users:
Customers cannot find or rediscover a product
Increased frustration while browsing leading to poorer customer experience
Opportunities for cross-selling are reduced
The impact to SEO:
Reduced internal linking
Reduced impressions and rankings for affected products
Increased negative user experience signals affect the overall perceived quality of the site
How to Find Orphaned Products
So, now we know the issue, we need to know how to fix it. I’m going to detail the approach I take although there are a couple of different tools out there where you can achieve the same thing.
We’re going to use Screaming Frog and compare the data it collects from crawling the website/GA4/Google Search Console to the data that is contained in your XML sitemap. As a crawler only finds pages through links, pages that don’t appear on a Screaming Frog crawl but do appear in your XML sitemap are likely to be orphaned.
For this you will need:
A paid subscription to Screaming Frog
Know the locations of all your XML sitemaps
To ensure that your XML sitemaps are working correctly
Access to your GA4 and Google Search Console accounts
The exact specifics for what to do you are detailed in this Screaming Frog tutorial but by the end you should be able to export a full list of all orphaned URLs – both for products and pages across the website.
How to Fix Orphaned Products
Depending on the scale of the results, you may need to create a prioritisation framework for which products should lose their orphan status first.
The Prioritisation Framework:
High priority: Products which have high profit margins / products have high search demand / products that are in stock / products that are strategically important
Medium priority: Products which were ranking well / products which have backlinks / seasonal products where the trading season is not far away
Low priority: Seasonal products where the trading season is a long time away / discontinued lines / thin pages / duplicate variants
If the number of orphaned products the store has is minimal then the list can simply be grouped into two; those pages which are orphaned and we want to keep and those orphaned pages that are no longer needed. Both require actions.
Note: Not all orphaned products need a fix! In certain circumstances, let’s say a VIP launch of a new product via email, a product may intentionally be hidden from the rest of the store.
Implementing the fix:
For those products you want to keep:
We need to reintegrate these pages into this site. This could be achieved by:
Attaching the product to other relevant product categories
Linking to the product from other products
Linking to the product from blog posts or buying guides
Featuring the product on the home page
Linking to the product from the main navigation
Depending on the quality of the URLs you’re working with you may also need to do some remedial work before you are comfortable with reintegrating these products with the rest of the site. This takes the form of more general SEO actions but could include:
Consolidating similar pages together (common with product variants)
Expanding the content of the page if thin
Ensuring the product information / photography is up to date
For those products you no longer need:
You need to switch these product pages off by deleting the page or setting it to draft* in the CMS
Generally, you will want to then 301 or 308 permanently redirect the URL to the next most logical page. This could be to a relevant product category or another similar product. Avoid redirecting everything to the home page. Re-crawl the list of URLs with Screaming Frog to ensure they are returning the correct status code.
*Note: Sometimes setting a page to draft may not exclude the product from the Google Merchant Centre feed so double check that it's been removed from their too.
When you’re ready, you can then repeat the Screaming Frog orphaned product process to ensure that all no incorrect orphaned products remain.
Preventing Orphaned Products in the Future
You can minimise the number of orphaned products in the future by combining a few technical checks with a few process changes across teams.
Technical checks of orphaned products can be integrated into a SEO teams regular workflow. The orphaned product process mentioned above with Screaming Frog can be fully automated using the built-in Schedule feature to run automatic recurring crawls and the data pushed directly to Google Sheets.
Part of a strong ecommerce operational process is also ensuring that the teams adding and managing products are aware of the effects their work has. SEO should never be siloed from the merchandising team (or any other team to be honest)
A lot more product can be sold if basic on-site SEO elements are implemented at launch and a lot more problems can be avoided if products are switched off with the correct procedures in place.
Some actions to implement on your store:
Crawl the website using the Screaming Frog process to identify orphaned products and pages
Find and fix affected pages using the prioritisation framework
Set up and automate a regular crawl in Screaming Frog to identify future orphaned products
Always avoid removing product pages without implementing a redirect
Don’t ignore discontinued inventory URLs sat in the CMS
Remember to communicate the commercial impact orphaned products can have on the store
Or, if you don't know where to start...
If you’re managing a ecommerce store that has grown rapidly over the last few years, there’s a high chance that orphaned products could be quietly suppressing organic revenue.
A technical ecommerce SEO audit can help uncover hidden inventory and identify where your systems are working against you. Get in touch for a free 30min consultation to talk about your store and its performance.