Internal backlinking

The graphs for this website's sitemap are unusual and very attractive.

Here's the 'Daisy' themed graph. perhaps more attractive but maybe less obvious what's going on.

So what *is* going on here? Upon investigation (aka switching on labels by clicking a button in the toolbar)...

... the 2015 pages are all linked from a page, two clicks from home, called 2015 (and only from that page). On that page is a link to a page called 2014 an on that page are links to all 2014 pages plus a link to 2013 pages and so on.

Visiting any of these pages makes it clearer. This is an unusual kind of pagination, a little like scrolling to the bottom of some content and clicking 'more' to load older content. From a user point of view it does work very well. Everything's really obvious, no-one's going to struggle to find the older content, it'll just take more clicks.

So is this a problem? The pages are all discoverable, so no problem there. But some might say that this site isn't making the best exploitation of internal backlinking. In this particular case I don't think it matters, these are reports going back in time, it's unlikely that a visitor is as interested in older reports than the newer ones.

Any other thoughts on the analysis of these graphs or thin internal backlinking - please comment.

(graphs generated by SiteViz, using sitemap files generated by Scrutiny)

Yesterday's post in this series: analysing the structure of larger sites