The City Planner's Unmarked Alley: On the Deliberate Discovery of the Unoptimized Path
In the meticulous world of urban planning, every street has a name, every intersection a sign, and every building a number. The goal is clarity, efficiency, and the frictionless flow of traffic. It is a philosophy we have wholeheartedly adopted in our digital architectures: clear URLs, logical site structures, and a rigid system of canonical tags and internal links that leave no room for ambiguity. We strive for a perfectly optimized, lossless user journey. But what if, in our quest for perfect order, we have paved over something vital?
This brings me to an idea borrowed from a different kind of planner: the advocate for ‘desire paths.’ These are the unofficial trails worn into the grass by pedestrians taking the most intuitive route, not the one laid out by concrete and decree. They represent a collective, organic intelligence. The most forward-thinking city planners don’t immediately re-sod these paths; they study them. Often, they eventually pave them, formalizing the public’s preferred, if unplanned, route.
Our websites have desire paths, too. We just call them ‘orphaned pages’ or ‘unlinked content’ and treat them as problems to be solved. We see a page with no internal links pointing to it and our immediate instinct is to either link to it or noindex it, tidying up the digital landscape. But what if we paused to ask why that page exists without a link? Perhaps it’s a forgotten piece of content. But perhaps it’s something else entirely.
An unlinked page can be a deliberate alleyway, accessible only to those who know the exact address or arrive from an external, serendipitous source—a shared link in a forum, a deep reference in an old blog post, a forgotten bookmark. It becomes a semi-secret space, a discovery that feels earned. This isn’t about hiding content; it’s about creating a different kind of user experience. It’s the digital equivalent of a speakeasy or a hidden garden, a reward for the curious and the engaged.
This approach challenges the tyranny of the absolute canonical. It suggests that not every piece of content needs to be forcefully integrated into the primary navigation or siloed into a rigid hierarchy. Sometimes, a page can simply… be. Its value isn’t in its PageRank or its position in the sitemap, but in its existence as a destination in itself, found not through a guided tour but through exploration.
Of course, a city of only unmarked alleys would be chaos. The broad avenues—our homepage, primary category pages, and key articles—must be clearly signposted and well-connected. But by allowing for, or even intentionally designing, a few of these unoptimized paths, we acknowledge that human curiosity doesn’t always follow a predefined map. We build not just for traffic, but for people. And sometimes, people enjoy taking a shortcut through the grass.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: