Internal linking
Links between pages on the same site, which control crawl paths, distribute link equity, and communicate topical relationships and page…
TechnicalInformation architectureSite structure
Site architecture
How a site's URLs, navigation and internal links are organised into a hierarchy that users and crawlers can traverse efficiently.
In full
Good architecture keeps important pages within a few clicks of the homepage, groups related content so topical relationships are explicit, and avoids orphaned or dead-end sections. Click depth correlates with how often pages are crawled and how much internal link equity they receive. On large sites, architecture is largely determined by the taxonomy and by which faceted combinations are made indexable.
Example
Flattening a five-level category tree to three levels and adding hub pages brings 8,000 deep product URLs within three clicks of the homepage.
Related terms
Breadcrumb navigation
A secondary navigation trail showing a page's position in the site hierarchy; with BreadcrumbList markup it can replace the URL line in…
Faceted navigation
Filter and sort controls on listing pages that can generate a combinatorial explosion of crawlable URLs from a small product set.
Topical authority
The degree to which a site demonstrates comprehensive, credible coverage of a subject area rather than isolated pages on scattered topics.
Orphan page
A page with no internal links pointing to it, reachable only via sitemap, external link or direct URL.