Here is a SEO new question I don’t think I’ve seen before. Someone asked if you need to link to all your pages from your home page. The answer is obviously no but not all new SEOs or site owners know this. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter “No, you don’t have to link to all pages from the homepage.”
If you think about it, there is SEO value from linking from your home page to your internal pages. Typically, your home page is your most valuable page in terms of PageRank, authority and expedited crawling. So spreading that home page link value to internal pages is a strategy a lot of SEOs use.
But no, for many large sites, it is impossible to link to every internal page from your home page. This site has like 50,000 pages on it and it is not considered large. But can you imagine if I had 50,000 links on the home page of this site to all my pages? That is not practical. Which is why you want to make sure your site navigation is super crawlable and useful for not just users but search engines. And when all else fails, use XML sitemaps.
Here is John’s tweet:
No, you don’t have to link to all pages from the homepage.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) January 11, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.