Scraper backlinks, orphaned pages, and Google juice: 10 SEO things every web owner should know

JH: Orphaned pages are really hard to find. The “best” way is probably to crawl the site with something like Ahrefs’ site audit and use the backlinks and sitemap as the URL source. This isn’t a surefire way to find all orphaned pages, but it does use backlinks and sitemaps as the source of the site’s URLs, so after crawling you’ll know if those pages have internal links.

PS: Finding orphaned pages generally requires crawling the site and combining that data with other data sources for the page. For site audits, you can have a sitemap, backlinks, or upload a custom list of pages. Orphan pages are pages that are not found by normal crawls and are included in other sources.

JH: This may come down to search intent for these topics/subtopics. If Google ranks broader guides on a topic in subtopics (less important information), we can put that less important information on the page for that topic. However, if Google specifically ranks pages about subtopics of subtopics, you may want to create a separate page about that subtopic.

PS: If you’re splitting pages, you’re splitting content, which can be good or bad. Each page has its own amount of “Google juice” which is just PageRank.

JH: Generally speaking, yes. Internal links from pages with many backlinks can transfer more PageRank to the internally linked pages.

PS: You don’t necessarily have more links, but stronger (higher PageRank) and more relevant links have more impact.

JH: No, because all internal links transfer PageRank and help rank your page. Also, even if your page is already ranked, relevant internal links are still useful to your site visitors, so you don’t need to set a cutoff point.

PS: It’s usually a good idea to link wherever it makes sense, not only for SEO but also for business reasons.

JH: As far as I know these days, it is unlikely to be harmful. Google is usually good at understanding when a site scrapes content and explaining it.

PS: There is a risk that they will be picked as the standard version and appear on Google, but this is fairly rare and usually happens more with syndicated content rather than scraped content. You can, but for scraper sites that tend to be low quality, these links may not count at all.

PS: It’s rarely worth it for SEO. It’s part of general website health and maintenance, and when a user clicks on one of these, it creates a poor user experience. Usually such links are because the page has been completely deleted so there is nothing to actually update. We recommend redirecting before changing all internal links.

PS: Always link to relevant content. Especially for new content, adding relevant links from existing content gives the new content the best chance of ranking.

PS: 301 redirects pass full values ​​as long as the content is similar. If the page content is completely different, it may be treated as a soft 404 and no value passed.

PS: It’s usually fine, but make sure you’re on the correct page. Due to things like caching it can be difficult to change later, and just like signal integration, this usually happens within a year of changing the redirect, after which the value is already different. It means that you are on the page of