Archived Pages Ranking for Keywords

Has anyone had experience with non-linked pages ranking for keywords? I'm working on a client's website, and while a prior company had created multiple of these pages to target keywords, Ahrefs designates the pages as an error. (since there are no incoming internal links)

Is it beneficial to keep these pages, or to redesign and incorporate them into the main site in order to try for a higher ranking? 

I'd recommend trying to think about this from a website visitor/user perspective. What's the value provided to the user on those pages that don't have internal links but are ranking in search? If they are valuable pages for users, that might be a good argument for incorporating them into the site structure explicitly, with internal links.

Also worth checking the backlink profile for those URLs. If there is incoming traffic to those non-linked pages, that would be another argument for keeping them (or at least gracefully redirecting them if you chose to move that valuable content onto other pages as you redesign the site).

Hope that helps!

Ed

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