That’s the claim many have made in the past, and it is interesting to look at. An orphan page is one that is not linked from any other page from your site. That pretty much makes it difficult for search engine robots to navigate through those pages. Search engine robots are not that smart to find your pages without a link. Having said that, if someone finds your page and puts a link to it, there is a good chance that it will be found.

Orphan pages do not hurt your search engine rankings but do not help it either. In fact, by having orphan pages you do not get the best out of each and every page on your site. Your goal should be to create theme-based websites to get ranked well on Google, and in order to do that, you need to do some serious inter-linking. So, do search engine penalize you for having Orphan pages? Not really! Should you do better and actually fix these pages? You betcha!