Definition
Crawl depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the homepage by following internal links.
Crawl depth explained
The homepage is usually at depth zero, pages linked from it are at depth one, and so on. Crawl tools report the depth of every URL they find, which quickly shows how deeply important pages are buried.
Depth matters for two reasons. Pages close to the homepage tend to be crawled more often and receive more internal link authority. Pages many clicks deep may be crawled rarely and treated as less important. The same applies to people: visitors rarely click through five levels of navigation to find something.
As a working rule, keep your important pages within about three clicks of the homepage. Ways to reduce depth include linking key categories from the main navigation, adding links to popular and new pages from hub pages, using breadcrumbs, replacing long chains of pagination with better category structure, and linking related pages to each other.
Example
A crawl of your recipe site shows new recipes sit seven clicks deep, reachable only through dated archive pages. Adding cuisine and ingredient hub pages linked from the menu brings every recipe within three clicks and speeds up how quickly new recipes are indexed.
Why it matters
Reducing the depth of important pages helps them get crawled, indexed and ranked, and helps visitors find them.
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Related terms
- Internal linkingInternal linking is linking between pages on your own site, which helps visitors navigate and helps search engines find pages and see how they relate.
- Orphan pageAn orphan page is a page no other page on your site links to, so crawlers and visitors can only reach it via a sitemap, external link or direct URL.
- CrawlingCrawling is the process by which search engine and AI bots discover web pages by following links and sitemaps, then download their content for processing.
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine can and wants to crawl on a site in a given time, set by crawl capacity and crawl demand.