SEO

Audit orphaned pages with no internal links

A prompt for cross-referencing a crawl export against a sitemap to find truly orphaned pages, then deciding case by case whether to link them or retire them.

Works with Claude / GPT600 uses 4.1

The prompt

seo-orphaned-pages-audit
A crawl of [yourdomain.com] using Screaming Frog found 1,600 indexable URLs, but a
separate sitemap-vs-internal-link-graph comparison shows 95 of them have zero
internal links pointing to them, they're only discoverable because they're in the
XML sitemap. Some look like genuinely useful old posts, others look like test pages
or abandoned landing pages someone forgot to unpublish.

CRAWL EXPORT WITH INTERNAL INBOUND LINK COUNT PER URL (paste, or list the 95
orphaned URLs with titles): [paste here]
SITE TYPE: [WordPress content site, 6 years old]

Work through the 95 like someone deciding what to do with them, not just reporting
the count:
1. For each orphaned URL (or a representative sample if the list is long),
   classify it: genuinely useful content that was simply never linked (an
   internal-linking oversight), outdated/superseded content that a newer post
   already covers, or a leftover test/landing page that should never have stayed
   live.
2. For the "genuinely useful, never linked" group, identify 2-3 specific existing
   pages on the site that should link to each one, based on real topical relevance,
   and specify anchor text, don't just say "add internal links" without naming the
   source pages.
3. For the "superseded" group, recommend a 301 redirect to the newer page rather
   than just leaving it both orphaned and indexed, since an orphaned-but-indexed
   near-duplicate can quietly feed keyword cannibalization even with no links
   pointing to it.
4. For the "leftover/test" group, recommend unpublishing or noindexing rather than
   investing linking effort, and flag that these should never have been in the
   sitemap generator's output in the first place, that's worth fixing at the source
   (usually a sitemap plugin including drafts or a forgotten page template).
5. Note that orphan status found via a single crawl tool can be a false positive if
   the tool didn't render JavaScript-inserted links, so before concluding a page is
   truly orphaned, confirm the crawl configuration actually rendered JS, otherwise
   recommend re-crawling with JS rendering enabled first.

Not every orphaned page deserves a link, some deserve a redirect, and some deserve to be quietly noindexed. This prompt sorts the 95 by what they actually are before recommending effort, and it checks an easy false-positive source first: a crawl that didn’t render JavaScript will flag pages as orphaned that actually have links.