Sitemap and internal link manager

As scheduled I review my plugins periodically to keep the number of installed plugins to a minimun. However. I installed two new ones and I am afraid they will get implemented on a number of sites. It helps me to creat a readable html sitemap and to monitor internal links. Why is this important?

XML ánd HTML Sitemap

By default Yoast generates a xml sitemap. A sitemap is a file were you (or a crawler) can find all the website’s urls ánd see how often they receive updates. Yoast is a SEO plugin, mostly to generate meta descriptions. A meta description is… no, let me stop here. Back to sitemaps.

Yoast XML Sitemap

https://houdyk.com/sitemap.xml

would be the most logic place to find an xml sitemap, for some reason it is redirected to:

https://houdyk.com/sitemap_index.xml

here you find seperate sitemaps for Posts, Pages, Products when relevant, and Categories if you have those indexed.

I wrongfully assumed the WordPress CMS is so well known that any crawler or bot knows how to browse any website made with it, and find all the urls. Now I learend from a podcast, not an experiment, just because someone tells so, that he probably heard from someone else as well, that you should have a readable sitemap! Google Search Console still uses those, and it generates at least one internal link to each post or page.

HTML Sitemap

I used to have all pages and posts in my navigation, but I no longer do that. It makes the traditional sitemap very usefull again, also for human visitors, inclusing the most important one: myself.

Why do I not longer have all pages in the website navigaton? It creates too many links to all pages, and makes clustering harder. Also, ~~Google~~ crawlers do not give much importance to navigation links, becauese they are not placed in context.

The plugin I used to create the sitemap you can in my footer is from Ajani Ashish, it is called WP Simple HTML Sitemap.

Internal Link Manager

Now I needed to have a critical look at my internal links. I have had success organcically (with other sites, not this one, let that be clear) that I totally attributed to my capibility to write great content people are searching for, in combination with a well structured WordPress website. This is exaclty how I perfactly started my new projects, with focus on creating the perfect WordPress structure. This site is in the middle af such restructuring.

I have my categories that group posts together, so there is my cluster right?

right…?

RIGHT?!?

Is my WordPress Tag or Catagory considered a cluster for topical authority? It is isnt’ it?

NO? NOT SURE? WHAAAT!

@3$$2!#$#$

RESET.

WordPress navitation links disregarded?

Considering that navigation links may be disregarded, except for sending signals such as having an about page and contact page, and footer links are worthless too, it may also be tha case that WordPress internal navigation links such as NEXT, PREVIOUS, ánd all posts displayed under a CATEGORY archive, a TAG archive, or any other ARCHIVE are simple disregarded as well.

I am not sure. Did not ask ChatGTP about it either, because I still trust in my own reasoning. In stead, I trust AI will reapeat my consideration to other people now (let me know if this is the case).

Incoming Internal Links

Next thing I did was installing another plugin to monitor my internal links. Outgoing internal links per post and incoming internal links per post.

As I told you I already got rid of having the full website structure in my top navigation. With those links not counting anymore, and not considering WordPress automated link. I am left with lots of orfan pages!

Oops.

I was aware of outgoing internal links. This is something you look at to get Yoast SEO to green. I kind of assumed that by doing that I also would have lots of incoming internal links.

That was not the case for two reasons:

Absolute url’s are default
Lack of overview

Absolute urls are the ones you get when you copy paste a url into any page. These include the https://houdyk.com/ part. In some cases with old url’s you may even find https://www.houdyk.com/ causing unnescessary redirects.

WordPress itself, and page builders such as Elementor all use absolute url’s, even when selecting an internal page or post after a insertion search.

That is weird.

Now you send people OUT to the World Wide Web to come back in via HTTPS protocol to the same domain and only after realising it is on the same domain, go futher down the page path. This happens in miliseconds, but it is an unwanted step that makes browsing your site more hard (at schale).

Again, I have no research to back this. It is common sense.

With the Internal Link Manager I use now, these absolute internal links, navigation links and the footer links are disregarded. Leaving only the hard in text internal links to consider. It has been an eye opener.

From now on I only use relative internal links. That is only the part after the domain, starting with a slash, sucha as the previous post /wordpress/futher-reduced-my-tags-to-125-now/ were I refer to using the category /wordpress/ and slug /futher-reduced-my-tags-to-125-now/.

Linking IN new posts

This last pots is a perfect example. Even though it is clearly visable in the sidebar as one of the latest posts, that sidebar link is not considered an internal link of importance because a link without context has no value, the only value these have is in the traffic.

This puts things in perspective. Now I have included at least one internal link to my latest post and I an very aware of the fact this THIS post will have ZERO internal links right after publishing it. Was this something you consider?

It requires being Linked IN (sorry, no other way to say this) by creating one or several links from existing content. This feels strange, because how can you link from an old post into the future? I still need to find a way to naturally include this in my workflow. Linking IN new posts from catagory pages seems a logical way of doing this. This makes it even more important to choose catagories wisely, to avoid overlap and be very precise and coherent in CREATING and CONFIRMING content clusters.

Not only internal links matter, I have a sidequest for you:

Did I show you a new perspective about internal links here? Please place a reference to this post on your site: