Internal link graph

A sitemap is a list of addresses. A link is a reason to go to one. The two are routinely confused, and the confusion is expensive in a specific way: a page listed in the sitemap and linked from nowhere is live, indexed and unreachable to a person, which for a reader is the same as not existing. The name for that state is an orphan page, and almost every site of any size has some without knowing.

Crawlers treat the graph as the argument about importance. A page the site links to from four contexts is being asserted as load-bearing; a page reachable only through the sitemap is being asserted as an afterthought, whatever the sitemap says. Neither claim requires anyone to write it down — the graph is the claim.

The failure is structural rather than editorial, which is why it survives good writing. Nobody sets out to orphan a page; it happens when a section is built, published, and then the thing that would have linked to it is built differently. Discovering it needs a traversal rather than a proofread, and it is the only defect on this list that is both invisible from inside every individual page and trivially machine-detectable.

Counting links instead of reading the paths they make

A site can add three hundred internal links, put them all in the footer, and change nothing: a link every page carries distinguishes no page from any other. What carries information is a link from inside an argument to the thing the argument depends on — which means the useful audit question is never how many links a page has, but which pages have no route into them from any context a reader is plausibly in, and what the site would have to say to justify one.

Here is the number, and here is the page it came off.

A definition proves nothing. These are the places on this site where this quantity was actually computed, with the period and whose figure it is stated beside each one.

Somebody is accountable for this number.

A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.

Web design and development for Dubai, built search-first

Search architecture is a build decision, not a later engagement.

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SEO and GEO for Dubai and the UAE

You are indexed as an entity, not as a set of pages.

Index coverage

The share of the pages you published that a search engine has actually stored — and a gap between the two is ordinary rather than a fault.

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Crawl budget

How much attention an automated reader spends on your site — influenced by what you publish and never controlled by it.

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Canonical URL

The one address a piece of content declares as its real one, so that every variant of it consolidates into a single entry rather than competing with itself.

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SEO

Making a site findable by search engines for the questions its buyers actually ask — a structural property of the site far more than a list of tasks performed on it.

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GEO

Being citable by an assistant that is assembling an answer, rather than merely rankable by an engine that is returning links.

All ninety-six termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.