A glossary nobody could point into
Our glossary held twenty-six definitions and none had an address, so a link could only reach the top of the list. Every term has one now; five pages link them.
We crawled every page the site builds, three hundred and sixty-four of them, and sorted every internal link by where it sits: in the footer, in the navigation bar, or in the body of the page where somebody is reading. The glossary came out with two hundred and ninety-two inbound links, one from every footer, and none from anywhere else. Not one sentence on the whole site pointed at it. A footer link counts for a crawler and is followed by almost nobody.
The reason nobody linked it was mechanical rather than editorial. The glossary is twenty-six terms in a list, and none of the terms had an id. So a page that wanted to say the payout run and send the reader to what that means could only send them to the top of the list and leave them to scroll. The structured data had the same gap in a different shape: it named all twenty-six terms for a search engine and gave none of them an address, which is a list of words, not a set of definitions.
What changed
Every term now carries an id made from its own words. Settlement is #settlement, payout run is #payout-run, the multi-vendor basket is #multi-vendor-basket, and so on through all twenty-six. The structured data carries each term’s address beside its name. And the five pages that describe money, ordering, the kitchen screen, stock and the register already used those words in their own prose, so the word now links to its definition at first use. No new copy was written. The words were there; they point somewhere now.
What stops it rotting
A test reads the built site and checks that every term’s anchor is clean and unique, that the structured data’s addresses match the anchors one for one, that each of the five pages links its term from the body and not the footer, and that every glossary link on all three hundred and sixty-four pages lands on a term that exists. We proved it bites before trusting it: with the change set aside and the site rebuilt, the glossary counted zero anchors and all five checks failed by name. Restored, twenty-six and green.
The lesson is small and general. A definition you cannot address is a definition nobody will link to, including you. Give each one a door and the links write themselves.