"To give a sense of importance within your website you'd need to do that more with regards to internal linking. So less less with just purely the sitemap and more kind of making it easy for Google to recognize when we crawl your site which of the pages you care about.

The most usually that's like we would start with your homepage, depending on the website but in many cases we start with the home page and things that are linked from the home page we would see as being more important than things which are just like i don't know five or six steps distance from the home page."

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler does exactly what John Mueller describes above: it starts with the home page of your website and then it follows the links on the home page. The audit report shows the exact number of clicks it takes to get to a particular page on your website.

The internal links on your website have an impact on the position of your web pages in Google's search results. Good internal links make it easier for your pages to be indexed and ranked by Google.

Reduce the number of clicks that are needed to get to important pages on your website. For example, you can do to reduce the click-depth:

• Increase the number of high-level categories on your website. The more high-level categories your website has, the quicker people will find particular pages.
• Increase the number of related links on your pages. For example, you could increase the number of linked similar products on a product page.

Improved internal links can also help you to improve the authority of pages that deal with a particular topic. Create hub pages on your website that link to all pages that are related to a particular topic.

The page that covers the main topic should be linked from the home page of your website. That page should be an authoritative page that covers the main topic from an expert view. Then link to the related pages from the main page.

The related pages should also link to each other to reinforce the relationship between these pages. Use anchor texts that are related to the topic in your links. By creating these content hubs, you increase the ranking chances of the individual pages.

Improve your internal links now

Stay safe during these difficult times!

"Bigger brands do tend to get hit with DMCA requests more frequently and if single sentence matches as in this case are enough for a Google DMCA takedown then media websites, large blogs, recipe bloggers, etc… might also want to keep a close eye on their analytics or Lumen Database for signs of possible takedowns."

"We see links as being between canonical URLs, so if the href points to something that's not a canonical URL for our indexing, then we don't see that as a link. Seems like a neat Gedankenexperiment though -- pagerank in phone numbers?"

"It shouldn't be the case that overnight, we flip some type of switch and there's a massive change. That's not typically how rollouts of this nature (such as speed, mobile-friendly) have worked.  [...]

So with page experience, it could become a more important factor over time than with an initial launch as a great page experience becomes more common to pages. But also, and as we've kept saying, it's one of many factors."

"[There are] 2 places where URL structure does matter: international sites (on a gTLD with country subdirectories) [and] sites with some adult content (use separate directories so we can filter the section it easier)."