One SEO professional asked John Mueller about internal linking and using structured data for breadcrumbs.
Their main question is: if one has structured data for breadcrumbs setup, is internal linking still important for SEO?
John answered that yes, absolutely. Internal linking is still super critical for SEO.
John believes it’s one of the biggest things you can do on your site to guide Google, and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.
And what you think is important is totally up to you. You can decide to make things important where you earn the most money, or you can make things important where you’re the strongest competitor, or maybe you are the weakest competitor.
With internal linking, you can really kind of focus things on those directions and those parts of your site.
And this is not something that you can just replace with structured data.
So just because there is structured data in a page somewhere, that is not a replacement for normal internal linking.
Even if in the structured data, you also provide URLs, Google does not use these URLs in the same way as they would use normal internal links on a page.
So, it’s not the case that hreflang annotations replace links between country versions or breadcrumb annotations, nor do they replace links between different levels of a website.
You really have to have normal HTML links between the different parts of your site in addition to this markup.
This happens at approximately the 25:15 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 25:15
Next one I have is: if you have structured data for breadcrumb setup, is internal linking still important for SEO?
John (Answer) 25:24
And yes, absolutely. It’s something where internal linking is super critical for SEO, I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.
And what you think is important is totally up to you. You can decide to make things important where you earn the most money, or you can make things important where you’re the strongest competitor, or maybe you’re the weakest competitor. With internal linking, you can really kind of focus things on those, those directions and those parts of your site. And that’s not something that you can just replace with structured data.
So just because there is structured data in a page somewhere, I wouldn’t see that as a replacement for normal internal linking. Even if in the structured data, you also provide URLs, we don’t use those URLs in the same way as we would use normal internal links on a page.
So it’s definitely not the case that hreflang annotations replace, kind of, links between country versions, or breadcrumb annotations replace links between different levels of a website. You should really have normal HTML links between the different parts of your website.
And ideally, you should not just have kind of like a basic set of links, but rather, you should look at it in a strategic way and think about what do you care about the most? And how can you highlight that with your internal linking?
