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I've also seen some advice to make "Spider Bread Crumbs" - trails to lead the spiders to your pages. I have the same question.
To make the issue practical, what would be the effect of putting a top level menu, in text links alone, at the bottom of every page?
What those communications are is not exactly known to we mortal human webmasters. But those cryptic messages can cause a given drone spider to abandon following up on the links from a page at any time. Or to follow links but not add those pages to their database. Or to call on a co-worker to follow the links, but the co-worker is much lazier and only comes around very rarely.
In short, I look at cross-linking schemes as insurance against these spider mysteries. I want not one trail, which a whimsical bot might drop accidentally, but many trails, especially to key pages (and what page isn't a key page?)
I use internal linking to maximize my page's chance of tasting "just right" to any spider that comes along.
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Even more, today's algos partially decide how important a page is by the interlinking structure of the total "surround" of web pages that connect with it. The prettier that link structure looks, the more important a page appears to be in the search engine's scheme of things.
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