Technical eligibility, control 6 of 20
T-06 Use crawlable navigation links
Important navigation should use real links with destinations, not rely solely on click handlers or unobservable interaction.
- Priority
- High priority.
- Hard gate
- No
- Change class
- AUTO_WITH_TEST: A candidate requiring relevant tests.
- Quality bucket
- Technical eligibility
Why it matters
If a menu or internal link works only through a script click, crawlers may never find the pages behind it. Visitors using assistive tools or with scripts disabled can also be stuck. Google's link guidance relies on standard anchors for this reason.
Evidence to review
- Link extraction, rendered DOM, keyboard navigation and internal-link graph.
How to implement
- Check anchors and hrefs in primary navigation, breadcrumbs, cards and related resources.
- Ensure important URLs can be reached from relevant hubs.
- Use buttons for actions, anchors for navigation, and descriptive link text rather than keyword lists.
How UltimateSEO checks this
Automated. A check in the scan sets PASS or FAIL for this control, and reports UNKNOWN or BLOCKED when its input is missing.
The check looks at: primary navigation and in-content links are real anchor elements with resolvable href values rather than script-only handlers.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Sources
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.