How can linking to irrelevant pages internally impact the user experience on a website?

Avoiding linking to irrelevant pages internally is important for several reasons:

1. **User Experience:** Linking to irrelevant pages can confuse users and disrupt their browsing experience. Users expect internal links to lead them to related or useful content, so linking to irrelevant pages can frustrate them and decrease their trust in your website.

2. **Relevance:** Search engines prioritize relevance when determining the ranking of web pages. Linking to irrelevant pages internally can signal to search engines that your website lacks coherence and may lead to a decrease in search engine rankings for the linked pages.

3. **Authority Distribution:** Internal linking is an important strategy for distributing authority (link equity) throughout your website. When you link to irrelevant pages, you're wasting valuable authority that could be passed on to more relevant and important pages, thereby reducing their potential to rank well in search results.

4. **Keyword Relevance:** Internal links often contain anchor text, which is an opportunity to use relevant keywords to signal the topic of the linked page to search engines. Linking to irrelevant pages with unrelated anchor text can dilute the keyword relevance signals and confuse search engine crawlers.

5. **Indexation Efficiency:** Search engine crawlers prioritize pages with high relevance and authority for indexation. When you link to irrelevant pages internally, you're essentially asking search engines to crawl and index content that may not be valuable or useful to users, wasting crawl budget and potentially delaying the indexation of important pages.

6. **User Trust and Engagement:** Consistently linking to irrelevant pages can erode user trust and engagement with your website. Users are less likely to click on internal links if they have been led to irrelevant content in the past, which can negatively impact overall user engagement metrics such as bounce rate and time on site.

Overall, linking to irrelevant pages internally can have detrimental effects on user experience, search engine rankings, authority distribution, keyword relevance, indexation efficiency, and user trust and engagement. It's essential to carefully consider the relevance of internal links and ensure that they lead users to valuable and related content that aligns with their interests and expectations.