By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.
In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.
Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?
Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph[1] are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly[2], but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:
I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less[3] as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.
A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)
eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts