Turns out you need to store the links you want to navigate to in advance. This is what ended up working for me (found this thread to be helpful):
driver.get(<some url>)
elements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//h2/a")
links = []
for i in range(len(elements)):
links.append(elements[i].get_attribute('href'))
for link in links:
print 'navigating to: ' + link
driver.get(link)
# do stuff within that page here...
driver.back()