Navigational link: A link that is part of the site’s template rather than its writing — menus, footers, sidebars, breadcrumbs and archive listings — and usually repeats on every page.
What they are good for
Navigational links get every visitor and every crawler to the main sections of a site. A hobby site about model railways might have a menu with Layouts, Scenery, Electronics and Beginners; each item puts a section one click from every page. That is valuable: it keeps section pages shallow in click depth and gives readers a way around.
Where they fall short
Because the same links repeat on every page, they say little about any one page. A footer link to “Contact” is on 800 pages, but it is the same link 800 times. Zyppy’s internal link study saw search traffic stop rising for pages with more than about 45–50 inbound links, and suggested sitewide navigation pointing at low-traffic pages as part of the reason — a correlation, but a useful warning against judging a page by its raw inlink count.
Navigational links can also hide gaps. A crawler reaches every post through category archives and pagination, so a post with no contextual links looks linked in a crawl report even though no reader will find it.
How to audit them
- Sort a crawl by inlinks: the top of the list is your sitewide link targets.
- Ask whether each one deserves to be there. Tag clouds, old promotions and login pages often do not.
- Check menus are plain HTML links. Google’s JavaScript guidance says it can only discover links that are
<a>elements with anhref.
The guide to how contextual and navigational links divide the work covers what each should do on a WordPress site.