Linked from the home page
What we check
Two things, each pass or fail, and the score is the average. First, does the home page link to at least three different pages on your site? Second, can at least half of the pages we sampled from your sitemap be reached in one click from the home page?
When we compare addresses, we ignore http or https, www, a trailing slash, and anything after a #. If the site has no sitemap, so our sample already came from the home page’s links, only the first half counts.
Why it matters
Crawlers judge a page’s importance partly by how close it is to the front door. A page linked from the home page gets found sooner, visited more often, and treated as one that matters. A page reachable only through a search box or five clicks deep may be crawled rarely, or never.
A home page that links to almost nothing — a single splash image, or a page built entirely in JavaScript — leaves a crawler with nowhere to go.
How to pass
- Link your most important pages from the home page: what you sell, who it’s for, pricing, about, and your best writing.
- Use ordinary links that are in the HTML, not buttons that only work with JavaScript:
<nav> <a href="/product">Product</a> <a href="/pricing">Pricing</a> <a href="/about">About</a> <a href="/blog">Blog</a> </nav> - If your sitemap lists pages that aren’t linked anywhere, either link them or ask whether they still belong.