Make every page reachable in three clicks

Done when

Walk internal links outward from the homepage and count how many indexable pages are reached within three hops. Every page in the sitemap must be among them. Report the number reached and the number of pages that were never reached — and retry a failed fetch before calling it unreachable, because a timeout looks exactly like an orphan. (Proof: a count.)

If this is a change to your product

What must become true

Every indexable page is reachable from the homepage within three clicks, following only links in the served HTML.

Where it usually lives

Usually the hubs: a section index that lists all of its children, and links in body copy rather than only in nav.

The trap

Links a client renders after hydration are invisible to a crawler that reads the served HTML — if a hub's list is client-only, everything under it is orphaned no matter how the page looks.

This unlocks

• Give every page four links from the body of other pages

In topics

• Technical SEO and indexing