The most classical situation is illustrated by the picture below:

How orphan files appear

Once there were four pages linking to "myfile.htm" ("myfile" can be an image, a stylesheet, or a script file, as well as an ordinary HTML page).

Then, you removed the link to "myfile.htm" from page 1, knowing there are three more pages linking to "myfile". After a certain period of time, you deleted the three pages (2,3,4) and decided to replace them with new ones. As a result, there are no more pages linking to "myfile.htm".

To find out which orphan files there are on your hosting server. If the file is orphaned, it cannot be detected through the link structure (since it is, after all, and “orphaned” file). After the auditor scans the entire link structure and compares it to your file structure, it is able to find out which files are orphans.

For each of the orphan files, you need to decide whether you have any further need for this file (of course, if the file is an important strategic page, it should be linked to from some other pages). If you desice that this file isn't needed any more, you should remove it from your hosting server to free some hosting space.

Warning: if you are not the original creator of the site, you should consult the site owners concerning each orphaned file before deleting it. Even if the file doesn't have any links pointing to it from inside the Web site, it still may have some inbound links pointing to it from other domains. You can find this out by checking the server logs to find out whether there have been any requests to this file from other domains / IP addresses since the time this file has become orphaned.

What you should remember

1. Orphan files are those not linked to from any other files of your site. If these files do not represent valuable content items, they may be deleted to further the technical optimization of the site by freeing up space on your hosting server.
2. Before deleting an orphan file from the server, make sure there aren't any important inbound links to it from other domains.

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