Should navigation links count toward your internal linking strategy?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 1 answer
- In a cluster of 8
Yes, for what they do: navigation links give every page a route to the site’s main sections and show Google which pages the site treats as central. What they cannot do is describe how two specific pages relate, because a menu link appears on every page regardless of subject. A strategy needs both layers: navigation for structure and discovery, contextual links in the body for topical relationships.
Two layers, two jobs
| Navigation links | Contextual links | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | Menus, headers, footers, breadcrumbs | Inside the body text |
| What they show | The site's structure and its main sections | How one page relates to another |
| Anchor text | Short labels, the same on every page | Written for each sentence |
| Coverage | Every page links to the same set | Each page links to the pages relevant to it |
| Risk if missing | Main sections become hard to reach | Pages on the same topic stay disconnected from each other |
Google’s ecommerce site structure guidance describes navigation as part of how Google understands a site: it says navigation structures such as menus and cross-page links can affect Google’s understanding of the site’s structure, and gives the example of linking menus to categories, categories to subcategories, and subcategories to products. That is the structural job, and navigation does it well.
Where navigation falls short
A menu link to a category appears on a page about one product and on a page about another, with the same label. It tells Google the category is central to the site, not that a given article explains part of its subject. That relationship comes from links in the body, with anchors that describe the destination and text around them that says why. A site that relies on menus alone keeps its sections reachable but leaves related pages unconnected.
Building the two together
Keep navigation focused on the sections and pages that visitors need from anywhere, and avoid stuffing menus with deep links to individual articles. Then add contextual links from each page to the related pages a reader would want next. Template links and body links are compared side by side in which internal links pass the most value, first-paragraph or footer. Count navigation as the frame of the strategy, and do the topical work in the text.
Add a comment