Crawl Depth

Crawl depth refers to the number of clicks or levels a search engine bot has to navigate through a website to reach a specific page from the homepage.

The deeper a page is within a website’s structure, the more clicks it takes to reach it from the homepage.

Importance in SEO

Crawl depth is an important factor in SEO because it can affect how easily search engines can discover and index a webpage.

Shallow pages (those closer to the homepage) are typically crawled more frequently and thoroughly than deeper pages.

This is because search engines have limited crawl budgets and must prioritize the most important and relevant pages.

Example

A homepage with a depth of 0, a category page with a depth of 1, and a product page with a depth of 2.

Do

• Keep important pages within a reasonable crawl depth, ideally no more than 3 clicks from the homepage.
• Use internal linking strategies to connect deeper pages to the site’s core content.
• Prioritize the crawling of important pages by including them in the sitemap and ensuring they are well-linked from other pages.
• Monitor your site’s crawl depth through tools like Google Search Console to identify any issues.

Don’t

• Overcomplicate your site’s navigation, making it difficult for users and search engines to find important pages.
• Create content silos where content is isolated and hard to access from other parts of the site.
• Ignore orphan pages (pages not linked to any other page on the site), as they are not easily discoverable by search engines.
• Use infinite scroll or lazy loading for important content, as these can make it harder for crawlers to find and index all the content.