Pages in the sitemap that nothing links to

Why it matters

A page that is in the sitemap but that no page on the site links to can only be reached by someone who already has its address, so visitors never find it. Google's advice is plain: "Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site", because it "uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl." Such pages are usually leftovers (an old landing page, a draft published by accident) or pages whose only link was in a menu that has since been redesigned.

Source: Make your links crawlable: Google can generally only follow a link that is an <a> element with an href, which is also all we count. We only say this when we scanned the whole sitemap: on a partial scan the link could be on a page we never saw.

How to fix it

Decide what each page is for. If it should be found, link to it from where a visitor would look for it: the menu, a parent page, a related article. If it shouldn't, take it out of the sitemap, and delete it or set it to noindex. A link only counts if it is a real one:

<a href="/wedding-cakes/tastings">Book a tasting</a>

Examples

These are the rule's own test pages, and what it says about each. They are run on every change to the rule book.

Warning1 page in the sitemap is linked from nowhere on the site: /old-landing-page.

fail-old-landing-page

Example site

{
    "pages": [
        {
            "url": "/",
            "links": [
                "/cakes"
            ]
        },
        {
            "url": "/cakes",
            "links": [
                "/"
            ]
        },
        {
            "url": "/old-landing-page",
            "links": [
                "/",
                "/old-landing-page"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

PassedEvery page in the sitemap is linked from at least one other page.

pass-all-linked

Example site

{
    "pages": [
        {
            "url": "/",
            "links": [
                "/cakes"
            ]
        },
        {
            "url": "/cakes",
            "links": [
                "/",
                "/cakes"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

pass-partial-scan-says-nothing

Example site

{
    "sitemap": {
        "urls": [
            "/",
            "/cakes",
            "/old-landing-page",
            "/not-scanned-1",
            "/not-scanned-2"
        ]
    },
    "pages": [
        {
            "url": "/",
            "links": [
                "/cakes"
            ]
        },
        {
            "url": "/cakes"
        },
        {
            "url": "/old-landing-page"
        }
    ]
}

PassedEvery page in the sitemap is linked from at least one other page.

pass-trailing-slash

Example site

{
    "pages": [
        {
            "url": "/",
            "links": [
                "/about",
                "/cakes/"
            ]
        },
        {
            "url": "/about/",
            "links": [
                "/"
            ]
        },
        {
            "url": "/cakes",
            "links": [
                "/"
            ]
        }
    ]
}