SEMRush reports that orphaned order pages created for logged in users are an SEO problem

Question

I have recently purchased SEMRush and have downloaded one of its reports that says my website has almost 5,000 orphaned pages.

Looking into these pages, they are automatically created on a logged in section of my website. This area is where users manage their account and create new orders which are sent directly into our CRM system.

Every time an order is created the page will show as something like /order/1245.

If they amend this order it then creates another page called /amend/order/1245. I get 1000s of these orders a month so these orphaned pages are going to increase.

Is this an SEO issue?

The logged in section is created using Angular (so my dev team tell me).

Answer 1

The orphaned pages are most certainly an issue since if a page does not have a link to itself from another url in the same domain, google will categorize it as something unimportant and this can have a negative impact on the whole site's SEO ranking.

Since these pages are login/checkout pages, you can use noindex to make sure these pages are not indexed. From a SEO point of view, there is no reason for a "goal completion" page to appear on a search's engine results, if by clicking it a random user can't access it. Login/checkout pages usually have personal information or purchased goods and can't be accessed via a single url, rather you have to complete a journey from within the site in order to reach them.

To ensure all these orphaned and automatically generated urls do not mess your SEO ranking, I would suggest to not index them at all (by using noindex). In any case, you want to aim for a good SEO ranking in all the other pages that lead to these (like your homepage, your products page, etc).