JS-only navigation orphans a quarter of your pages

JS-only navigation orphans a quarter of your pages

In 142 SPA-style sites, links rendered only via onclick/router (no <a href>) left a median 26% of pages with zero crawlable inbound paths.

— Sites with JS-only nav: 34.0% ▓▓▓░░░░░░░
— Median orphaned pages: 26.0%
— p90: 49.0%
— Indexation rate of orphans: ↓ 5.8x

Failure mode: the nav 'works' for users but the crawler sees a <div onclick> with no href. No href, no edge, no discovery.

Fix: every navigational link must be a real <a href> with a resolvable URL in the HTML, JS enhancement optional. Cohort that converted div-clicks to anchors cut orphans from 26% to 4% and lifted indexed coverage ↑ 19%.

So what: if a link isn't an anchor, it isn't a link to Google.