(Entry was posted by Daniel Barbour on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/14/2017).

Is there such a thing as "background content"?

Are island pages helpful? Hi guys, is there such a thing as "background content"? The page in question is for a plumbing business and we have 5 pages of content that are geo relevant, they talk about the service areas of the business. They`re not directly relevant to the business, so they were never published on the blog and there are NO links anywhere on the site that could help a user navigate to these pages. I read somewhere that if Google`s bots can`t crawl a site and access a page through links, then Google doesn`t even know it exists. Is that true? Are these "island pages" with no "bridges" (links) that would help a bot access the content? Is it enough to have Google fetch the pages, or have Google Analytics on the site? (I personally feel like we should have links to them somewhere, but I want some others` opinions!)

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Alan Bleiweiss: I refer to these as orphaned pages. Here`s the reality. You can get them indexed, even without internal links pointing to them. Do it by inclusion in sitemap files. Except what`s the point? If they don`t have site-wide navigation on them, they`re still isolated, and won`t help human visitors who might stumble into them. It`s toxic to usability. And useless for SEO specific to the site overall.
Jeff Ferguson: Depends on their purpose. Do they need to be found via search engines? Or are they just single purpose landing pages? If the latter, don`t sweat it.