Orphaned pages & documents
Adding links to this content can improve findability.
Orphaned pages and documents are those not linked from other pages on Mass.gov, and as a result, it can be hard for people to find them.
While all pages on Mass.gov must have a parent page assigned before they can be published, all pages should also be linked from at least 1 field on another page. For example, if you found an orphan Information Details page, you might add a link to it from a Flexible Link Group or Rich Text section on a Service page (see chart of which content types can be selected as parents for other pages).
You can use the “Orphaned pages” or “Orphaned documents” reports, which can be found under the “Reports” tab in the top navigation bar of the CMS, to identify your organization’s unlinked pages and documents.
Some content types, including News and Events, plus items that are in Collections, aren’t included in the “Orphaned pages” report. Promotional pages might also be orphans, as they may be part of a campaign using a friendly URL to drive traffic.
If you see items in this report, you should either unpublish the page if it is not needed or add a link to the page from another published page. Look at the parent page to see if that is where the orphan page should be linked, or if another parent page is more appropriate.
If a page is redirected, in some cases it may show up on this report as an orphan even if it is linked from another page. On the orphan page, go to the Analytics tab and check the Audience statistics. If most of the traffic is from Mass.gov, check the top previous page URL to see if the orphan is linked on that page.
Pages that are not linked can still be found by the public through search because published pages are in a sitemap that is made available to search engines.
We recommend you start with high traffic pages.
The “Orphaned documents” report works in much the same way as the pages report. To verify that a document is not linked, you can search for the link in Siteimprove's link inventory, or look for a link in Google. In Siteimprove, find "Inventory" on the left hand menu, then go to to "Documents," then select the document type (Excel, PDF, etc.) you’re looking for and locate the document via the search bar by typing in words from its URL. Under the "Pages" column, you’ll see how many pages the document is linked from--if none, you've got an orphan document.
Documents that are not linked but are published can still be found by the public through search because published documents are in a sitemap that is made available to search engines.
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