Tagged “internal-links”
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When Google Canonicalises Two Unrelated Pages Together
A Google-selected canonical from a different section usually means two pages share an identifier or a pre-render state. Here's how to find which one.
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URL Depth and Click Depth Are Different Things
Slashes in a path are not a crawl cost. Clicks from an entry point are. Here's how to measure each and why flattening URLs rarely changes anything.
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How to Tell Scraper Traffic From Real Crawlers in Your Logs
Unfamiliar bot traffic in your access logs is often a third-party scraping API, not Googlebot or a hostile attack. Here's how to tell the difference.
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Navigation That Only Exists After JavaScript Runs
A crawler follows anchor elements with href attributes. Click handlers, buttons and hash routes are not links, and the pages behind them go undiscovered.
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Hreflang and the Return-Tag Requirement
Hreflang only works when every page in a cluster points back at every other. Why one-directional annotations are ignored, and how the sets break.
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Noindex and Nofollow on the Same Page
Page-level nofollow is not the same as rel=nofollow on a link, and combining it with noindex has a consequence people don't expect.
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Faceted Navigation and the Crawl Space It Opens
Five filters with four options each is a combinatorial URL space. How to decide which combinations get paths, which get blocked, and which get no links.
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Pagination Without rel=next and rel=prev
Google stopped using the pagination link elements. What replaced them: crawlable links, self-canonicals per page, and no canonical to page one.
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What an XML Sitemap Is Actually For
A sitemap is a discovery hint, not an indexing instruction. What it can fix, what it cannot, and why lastmod is the only optional field worth setting.
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Reading Log Files for Crawl Evidence
Server logs are the only record of what a crawler actually requested and what you actually served. How to verify the client and what to count.
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Internal Linking as Plumbing
Click depth, orphan pages, and crawl paths — internal links are the only part of the link graph you fully control.