Dead end pages are really an issue?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have many pages which are help guides to our features. These pages do not have anymore outgoing links (internal / external). We haven't linked as these are already 4th level pages and specific about particular topic. So these are technically dead end pages. Do these pages really hurt us? We need to link to some other pages?

Thanks

[DenisZilberberg]

Yes, Dead-end pages are harmful to websites.

Solution 1: It should be optimized to include links to the homepage or some important links to the site.

Solution 2: Use sidebar, footer or banner.

Thanks

[davebuts]

Hi vtmoz,

Are you saying that you don't have a header/footer on these pages? No main navigation? No breadcrumbs?

To me, that sounds like a terrible user experience. What is a user supposed to do when they get to these pages? Click the back button in the browser or manually edit the URL in the address bar?

If you do have a header/footer with navigation links, then it's not a dead end page

Cheers,

David

[vtmoz]

Thanks for the response. Actually we serve our pages differently to Google bots and Users. Users can see related pages but we can't see while browsing as bot. So, ultimately there are no other links on most of the pages for Google. With your brief, its clear that we definitely can have different links. But as I said, these pages are user guides about every feature we provide. So can we link back this page to same page of feature it's been linked from? And we think about what other links we can employ on these pages.