Start with journeys, page roles, and priorities
Choose the pages where a wrong turn has real cost: services or products, categories, contact or conversion, support, account tasks, and recovery instructions. For each, record the likely entry page, visitor question, helpful next page, action, and route back to a parent or hub. Hub pages organize a topic; detail pages answer a narrower question; navigation and breadcrumbs provide orientation. Do not build an artificial silo that stops a person from reaching another genuinely useful section. Test a direct landing on a deep page as well as a journey that starts at the home page.
Fix paths to revenue, account, support, safety, legal, and recovery tasks before convenience links.
Give each important page an appropriate inbound route and a clear way to related or parent content.
Write anchors that describe the destination
Anchor text is the visible clickable wording. Google recommends text that is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both the current and destination pages. W3C says a link purpose must be determinable from its text alone or its programmatically determined context under WCAG 2.4.4. Replace bare “click here” or repeated “learn more” labels with wording such as “compare annual and monthly plans” when that accurately describes the target. Keep the same wording for the same purpose, use different wording for different destinations, and do not turn anchors into forced keyword lists. For image-only links, supply descriptive alternative text.
Read the link by itself or with its associated sentence. A reader should be able to predict the destination.
Make the destination title, heading, and opening content fulfill what the anchor promised.
Make every important route crawlable and usable
A control that looks clickable is not necessarily a dependable navigation link. Use an HTML a element with an href that resolves to a real URL for important routes. Google says dynamically inserted links can be crawlable when the rendered markup uses that form, but it cannot reliably extract destinations from event-only controls. Inspect the rendered page after JavaScript, consent, CDN, or personalization layers run. Separately check response status, redirects, canonicalization, noindex directives, authentication, and robots controls; one successful click does not prove every search condition. MDN also notes that anchors with href create hyperlinks and are keyboard-activatable.
Use a link to navigate and a button for an in-place action; do not choose a button only for styling.
Test representative rendered templates and essential routes after shared navigation or routing changes.
Prevent orphan pages and clean up changed routes
An orphan page has no internal link pointing to it. Google’s guidance says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page. This is a baseline, not a demand for many links: private, duplicate, expired, or utility URLs may intentionally be unlinked. Keep an exception register with an owner and review date. Compare the CMS inventory, sitemap, crawl output, and landing-page data to find pages with no inlinks, broken source pages, and URLs that only appear in a footer or sitemap. When publishing, add relevant links from a hub, parent, or existing content; when retiring, update sources and verify any redirect is a substantively relevant replacement.
Do not release an important indexable page until its inbound and return routes have been reviewed.
Update contextual references as well as redirects so visitors do not meet stale choices.
Audit with evidence, not link-volume targets
Google says there is no magical ideal number of links on a page. Rank work by impact: a failure on checkout, password reset, or critical support outranks a low-value related article. Crawl internal HTML links and record source, target, anchor or accessible name, placement, final status, redirect target, priority, owner, and verification. Use Search Console’s Links report as a directional discovery signal, not a complete inventory: Google says it is sampled, groups canonical URLs, combines duplicates, and limits tables. Compare it with your own crawl and CMS list. Walk key flows on desktop and mobile, including keyboard use, before a launch and after material template changes.
Retest the live source and intended final destination after every material repair.
Put template-level defects into engineering backlog rather than repeatedly editing individual pages.
Make route integrity part of release readiness
A navigation or template deployment can alter many paths at once. Treat critical links as a release risk even when the server itself is healthy: a visitor cannot benefit from an available page if a key route no longer reaches it. Status Is UP applies this as proactive optimization and remediation, not downtime monitoring: preflight priority public journeys, record expected destinations and owners, and correct route failures before they cause avoidable friction. Set a review cadence that matches publishing velocity, with an additional focused audit for migrations, navigation redesigns, routing changes, and content retirements.
Preflight revenue, account, support, recovery, safety, legal, and high-intent category routes.
Keep a dated test record showing source, expected target, final result, reviewer, and remediation owner.