Would adding links between pages help Google index more of our site?

Question

We have a hotel search website. We have identified some concepts that we would like Google to index, for example, we have a landing page for "Boutique Hotels in Chicago, IL", Given number of cities in the U.S., we have more than 100K such pages.

However, Google is currently indexing our pages at the rate of only ~350 pages per day. And over 100K pages will take a year to index.

Our website can currently be navigated mostly by typing search queries + destination cities. It's similar to other travel search sites. There are almost no internal links between each landing page. In this case, is it important to start putting internal links between pages/improve navigation (e.g. breadcrumbs style [city] >> [some query]) and does it help to improve crawling speed?

Are you currently relying on sitemaps as the sole means to let Googlebot know about your pages? If so you should read The Sitemap Paradox. — Stephen Ostermiller, Mar 20 '20 at 05:04
Hello Stephen - yes only sitemaps contain the urls of the landing pages. I will read it. Thank you! — Yibin Lin, Mar 20 '20 at 05:29

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 28 '20 at 11:38

Google needs a source for the links of your pages, so it can index them. There are multiple ways than can make Google index more pages:

Add a sitemap with most of the pages.
Include breadcrumbs in your pages.
Submit the urls using Search Console or via the API.

So the simple answer to the question Would adding links between pages help Google index more of our site? is yes.

Would adding links between pages help Google index more of our site?

1 Answers1