How to find orphan pages with On-Page API?

An orphan page is a page receiving no internal links, that is, no reference from other pages of the domain.

Orphan pages cannot be reached by following internal links. Accordingly, neither search engine bots nor website visitors are likely to find it. Another issue with orphan pages is that no trust signals are passed to them through internal links. So, even if the search engine bots find an orphan page through external links, it will still be problematic to understand the meaning of page content, and accordingly rank it for relevant queries.

Discovering orphan pages and reviving internal links to them helps to recover pages with valuable content, and remove unnecessary pages that may be wasting your crawl budget.

To obtain a list of orphan pages with DataForSEO On-Page API, remember to register and get your API key that should be used for authentication.

Learn more about Authentication in our docs >>

1 Set a task to On-Page API and specify the necessary website.

POST: https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/on_page/task_post

[
  {
    "target": "dataforseo.com",
    "max_crawl_pages": 10,
    "tag": "some_string_123",
    "pingback_url": "https://your-server.com/pingscript?id=$id&tag=$tag"
  }
]

2 Call the Summary endpoint to review collective data for the indicated site.

GET https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/on_page/summary/$id

In the response from this API endpoint, you’ll find the "is_orphan_page" counter. If it shows a value greater than 0, our crawler found the indicated number of pages on the target website that receive no links from other pages of the domain.

3 Retrieve a list of URLs using the Pages endpoint. Simply set a task with a filter as in the example.

POST: https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/on_page/pages

[
  {
    "id": "07281559-0695-0216-0000-c269be8b7592",
    "filters": [
      [
        "resource_type",
        "=",
        "html"
      ],
      "and",
      [
        "checks.is_orphan_page",
        "=",
        true
      ]
    ]
  }
]

The response will contain a list of orphan pages, as well as detailed page health metrics, including meta tags checks, page timing, and over 60 other on-page check-ups.