How does LinkJuice detect orphan pages?

[laura_s]

My report shows 23 'orphan pages'. How are these defined? Does LinkJuice count pages with only one internal link as orphans too?

[Kate M.]

An orphan page in LinkJuice is defined as a page that appears in the destination column of your link data (i.e., it exists) but has zero inbound links from any other page in the crawl.

Pages with only one link are not orphans — they're just poorly linked. You can filter for pages with inbound link count = 1 separately if you want to find near-orphans.

Note: if a page is only linked from outside the crawl (e.g., only in your XML sitemap or from external sites), it will show as an orphan in the internal link analysis.

[Ryan]

Just to add to what's been said — I ran into the same issue last month. The key for me was checking the crawl was set to JavaScript rendering mode. That doubled the number of links Screaming Frog found and the LinkJuice PageRank shifted noticeably for several pages.

[Kate]

One thing I'd add: even if the scores look confusing at first, sort by PageRank descending and compare the top 10 against your GA4 sessions. The correlation is usually clear. High-traffic pages should also have high internal PageRank — if they don't, you've found a real problem.