Ensure all internal links link directly to indexable pages, why?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Josh Levenson: Why wouldn`t you want to index your Contact or About pages?
  
  6d
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  Robbie King: Josh Levenson well my guess was is that people won`t be searching for them. The only pages people might google are my blogs, homepage, services pages. But going from people`s responses it seems like I should probably index contact and about.
  
  5d
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  Josh Levenson: Before someone does business with someone else, they usually want to know who the person in charge is. Their background and stuff. Gets them more comfortable moving forward. The quickest way to find that is through indexed pages in a Google search.
  
  5d
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  Robbie King: ah ok, yeah I know how important my contact and about pages were but kinda figured they`d only be accessed via navigation once they had landed on my site. So kinda thought there was no point indexing them. Anyway now I I`ll make sure everything is indexed.
  
  Should I still include them on my sitemap too? Or are sitemaps only to prioritse the top top things you want google to index? Namely my blog, services pages and homepage.
  
  5d
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  Ammon Johns: Just to further reinforce what Josh Levenson is saying, I almost always track visits that hit the about page as a micro-conversion. If someone hits that page, they are seriously thinking about doing business with you, not just window shopping. Visits and interest in your About page is a very important signal to track in many cases.
  
  4d
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  Scott Hendison: They just mean for you to make sure your links are good, aka they go to pages that serve a 200 response, and that go directly to whatever page the user ends up on, and not to a redirect or a chain of old redirects.
  
  6d
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  Ash Nallawalla: When articles speak of "internal links" they usually mean links in the body of the pages and not navigational links. You do want your contact page to be indexed - it is indeed a highly searched term for consumer businesses that get a lot of customer enquiries and complaints. Your About Us page is also quite important to customers, even though you might think of yourself as an anonymous outlet.
  
  6d
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  Robbie King: Ash Nallawalla aaah thanks yeah that`s good to hear.
  
  5d
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  Michael Martinez: Take what advice you like and adapt it to your own needs and priorities.
  
  6d
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  Destiny Hale: You want all of your pages indexed no matter how important they are or aren`t.
  
  6d
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  Robbie King: Destiny Hale ah ok well then in which instances would you use noindex and exclude a page from the sitemap? I want to focus on driving traffic to my blogs, homepage and services pages.
  
  5d
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  Destiny Hale: Robbie King maybe any non important product pages. Any pages with little to no content. Pages with no user intent. Pages such as about me, contact us etc. should be always indexed however they don`t need backlinks.
  
  5d
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  Robbie King: Destiny Hale aaaah gotcha. Thanks a lot!
  
  5d
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  Helmut Berié: I think, at the face of it, the advice is not wrong. But with many things in SEO, there is always the "it depends" disclaimer.I think in particular in e-commerce, with product listing pages and refinements, most of the time, you don`t want those refinement links to be going to indexable pages. In my opinion, no-following such links to preserve crawl capacity is a good practice.
  
  6d
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  Richard Hearne: Why would you not want Google to index your About or Contact pages?
  
  5d
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  Jeff Ferguson: That was probably a bit of an overswing on their part. I`m sure they have their reasons for saying it (like that they wrote it purely from the standpoint of only doing things for SEO purposes), but this is one that is more guideline than rule for sure.
  
  2d
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  David Ogletree: They should have said don’t link to pages that are not indexed unless you meant to. If you need a link for users then you should link to it. I would not noindex internal links since that is not what noindex is meant for and you would just be pointing out to Google that you are actively trying to design your website specifically for search engines.
  
  2d