Those poor little orphaned pages. Google doesn't have a soft spot for them. These are pages that you can get to by typing in the URL, but are not linked to from anywhere on your site. Keep too many of them alive and you may experience some issues with your ranking. The most familiar type of orphaned page is what we call a Landing Page. Many builders use landing pages in their marketing efforts to display more specific information to the people they are marketing to--for instance, a page that contains helpful information for military families who are relocating to the area and links to nearby new home communities. While landing pages are awesome for marketing, they aren't search-engine-friendly. Keep in mind we're talking about a true landing page here--one that you purposely left out of your site navigation because you only want to share it with certain people. A simple fix for a landing page is to have your SEO specialist put a meta tag on the page to let the search engine know that it doesn't need to count this page as part of the site. We take care of this when you commission a custom landing page through Builder Designs, but since you also have the option to create pages in your admin, you'll want to let us know when you've created a page you plan on keeping hidden. SEO crawlers can understand that every page of your site exists, but it still goes through the site to look at the links between pages in order to understand which pages are the most important. When it gets stuck trying to get to an orphaned page, it will abandon your site without indexing the rest of your content. This means there is potential that you might add a new community or home to the site and it will take a long, long time to get picked up by the search engine. In the admin of your Builder Designs website, you have the handy option of hiding communities, homes, or plans you're not ready to display on the website. You also have the option to remove unused pages from your site navigation without deleting them outright, in case you want to use them later. While these are great options that give you more control over your website, they do come with SEO implications. Everything in your admin that generates a page will do so regardless of whether the item is set to show or not. All it means is that the page is or isn't linked to on the site. So you've probably guessed it--all of your hidden items and unused pages are actually orphaned pages. So how big a deal is this in the scheme of things? Not a huge one, necessarily. Don't get caught up in the implications of hiding a community or two as you work on rolling out a new section. It's helpful for you to store this info since you know you'll need it later. But on a side note, it's very possible that someone may still access your hidden pages through links on other websites or their bookmarks section, especially if it's a community which might have received press on other sites. You may want to delete the community if you do not want anyone to be able to access the page. All in all, continue to use the show/hide feature as it's useful to you, but when you officially close out a community, home, or plan, go ahead and delete it. Otherwise, when you end up with 50-100 orphaned pages, you may really begin to see your SEO ranking take a hit.