Navigation: the links that decide what gets crawled

A site is a graph of pages joined by internal links. The home page and everything linked from the navigation are crawled most often. Pages three clicks deep are crawled less and refreshed later. Pages nobody links at all are found only through the sitemap and rank worst.

Your menu appears on every page, so every link in it is a link from the whole site. That is why it is the strongest internal signal you control, and why putting forty things in it helps none of them.

This is the mistake that makes a whole section invisible. A crawler follows anchors with an href. A div with a click handler is not a link, however it looks and behaves for a mouse.

<!-- Invisible to a crawler -->
<div class="nav-item" onclick="router.push('/guides')">Guides</div>

<!-- A link -->
<a href="/guides">Guides</a>

• Every menu item is an anchor with a real path in the href attribute.
• Your framework's link component renders one. A styled button does not.
• A menu that only exists after JavaScript runs is a menu the AI crawlers never see, because they do not execute scripts.
• Keep the link text as the words people use: Pricing, Guides, Free tools. The text of a link is the description of the page it points at.

There is no ranking limit on links per page. There is an attention limit, and an equity one: every link in the menu shares the same strength, so ten items give each less than five.

Everything that does not earn a place in the menu is reached from a hub page instead. A hub with an overview and the links to its section keeps those pages two clicks from the home page without crowding the header.

• They are fine for search as long as the links are anchors in the HTML, present whether or not the panel is open.
• Rendering the panel's links only on hover, from a script, hides them from crawlers. Hidden in CSS is fine; absent from the DOM is not.
• Group by what a visitor is looking for, not by your internal structure. A visitor does not know your team's names for things.
• Do not put your entire catalogue in there. A hundred sitewide links pass very little to each and turn every page into a directory.
• Give each group a heading that is itself a link to the section hub, so the group has a page behind it.

Google indexes the mobile version of pages. If your phone menu shows a shorter list than the desktop header, the shorter list is the one that counts as your site's navigation.

• Keep the same links in both. A hamburger menu that hides them behind a tap is fine, as long as the anchors are in the HTML.
• Do not drop sections on mobile to save room. Drop them everywhere or keep them everywhere.
• Tap targets far enough apart, and a menu that closes without swallowing the back button.
• Check it with URL Inspection: Test live URL, then look at the rendered HTML for your menu's links.

A footer that links a hundred pages passes little to each and adds nothing to the crawl. It is not a second sitemap. It is where the things a visitor looks for at the end of a page live.

• Legal: terms, privacy, the company details.
• Contact and support, as a real address rather than a form nobody answers.
• The section hubs, one link each, not every page inside them.
• The machine-readable doors if you publish them: the sitemap, llms.txt, an API or an MCP endpoint.
• Social profiles, which also serve as the sameAs list in your Organization markup.

1. 1

   List the jobs a visitor arrives with

   Understand what this is, see whether it fits my case, know what it costs, start using it, get help. Five jobs, five candidates.

2. 2

   Name the page that does each job best

   One page per job. If two pages claim the same job, that is a merge waiting to happen, not two menu items.

3. 3

   Check the traffic you already have

   Search Console's pages report shows what people actually land on. A page taking a quarter of your clicks and reachable only from a blog post belongs in the menu.

4. 4

   Put everything else behind a hub

   A section hub with an overview and the links inside it. The hub is in the menu; its pages are one click further, which is close enough.

5. 5

   Add the breadcrumb

   It gives a second path up the hierarchy on every inner page, and with BreadcrumbList markup it replaces the URL line under your result.

A worked example. Yourproduct.com had nine header links, including three feature pages nobody visited. They moved to a product hub, the header dropped to five, and the guides section gained a place. Nothing was deleted, and every page stayed within two clicks of the home page.

• View source on a page and search for the menu's link text. If the hrefs are not in the HTML, that is the first fix.
• Crawl the site and look at the click depth column. Anything deeper than three clicks from the home page is relying on the sitemap alone.
• List the pages with no internal links pointing at them. Orphans are usually pages that were removed from a menu and never given another home.
• Count the sitewide links. If the number is in the hundreds, the footer has become a directory.
• Read the crawl stats report. Crawl spent on parameters, old redirects and dead ends is crawl not spent on the pages in your menu.