heddle check --only orphans
Orphan Pages Check
The orphans check fails any page that no other page links to, since only the sitemap knows such a page exists. Without it, a page you published can sit outside every link on the site, known only to the sitemap and ranked late. Pages nobody can reach by following a link. A page only the sitemap knows about is crawled late and ranks badly. On the site this came from it happened twice through the navigation.
When Heddle is set up on your site, this check runs on every build alongside 15 others, so a page that fails it is fixed before a buyer or a search engine sees it.
Why it exists
Pages nobody can reach by following a link.
A page only the sitemap knows about is crawled late and ranks badly. On the site this came from it happened twice through the navigation. The Industries and Case studies submenus shipped without two pages that were live and in the sitemap, because the menu was hand-written and the pages were added elsewhere. Forty-one city pages also linked only to each other, so no crawl from the homepage reached them until the links were rebuilt.
Three rules:
- Every built page has an inbound link from another page. A link to itself does not count.
- Pages matching site.json orphans.navRequired (route regexes, e.g. every service and industry page) are linked from the site navigation. A
or - Every page in a generated family manifest is built, and its sibling links point at pages that exist.
meta checks the crawl path from the homepage; this one names what the path should have included.
From lib/checks/orphans.mjs in the Heddle repository at de0c02b.
Questions
What does the orphans check look for?
Pages with no inbound link from another page, nav coverage, and family links to nowhere.
Does the orphans check need an AI model?
No. It reads the built pages or the sources directly, so it runs offline and costs nothing per run.
How do I run it?
Build the site, then run node bin/heddle.mjs check <site> --only orphans from the Heddle repository.
Work with us
Let the agents bring you the leads.
Tell us about your business and who buys from you. On a short call we'll show you the searches your buyers make where you don't show up yet, and what the agents would do about them in their first month.
On the call, for your site
- The searches your buyers makeMeasured, with how many people make each one
- Where you show up, and where you don'tOn Google and in ChatGPT's answers
- The agents' first monthThe pages, fixes and links they would start with