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Crawling & crawl budget

Crawl depth

Also known as: click depth

Crawl depth, also called click depth, is the number of link steps between a starting point and a URL. The starting point is usually the homepage. In this counting the homepage has depth 0, and a page linked directly from it has depth 1. Some tools count the homepage as depth 1. SEO crawlers report the value for every URL they find.

Why does crawl depth matter?

Pages with a long link path are harder to find. Google can only follow links written as <a> elements with an href attribute, so a page that exists only behind script-driven navigation has no usable path at all.

According to reports, Google’s John Mueller said in a 2018 hangout that Google does not count slashes in URLs. What matters a little is how many clicks it takes to reach a page from the homepage. According to Search Engine Journal’s report, a page one click away signals more relevance than a page several clicks away. Google does not name a maximum depth.

Crawl depth is therefore different from URL path depth. /a/b/c/d/ can sit one click from the homepage, and /product-x/ can be four clicks away.

Site architecture and click depthTree of a website: the home page is at depth 0, categories A and B at depth 1, three subcategories at depth 2, three products at depth 3. Product 1 is reached via the home page, category A and subcategory A1, and its breadcrumb shows that path. On the right is an orphan page that no internal page links to.Depth0Depth1Depth2Depth3Home pageCategory ACategory BSubcat. A1Subcat. A2Subcat. B1Product 1Product 2Product 3no linksOrphan pageno link points hereBreadcrumb on Product 1Home page › Category A › Subcat. A1 › Product 1Click depth = number of links from the home page. Google finds pages mainly through links.
Each level sits one click further from the home page. Google finds pages mainly through links and recommends that every page you care about gets a link from at least one other page on the site. The breadcrumb shows the page’s position in the hierarchy. Sources: Google Search Central: Link best practices for Google; Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide; Google Search Central: Breadcrumb (BreadcrumbList) structured data.

Example

Homepage (0) → category (1) → subcategory (2) → product list page 3 (3) → product (4). A product reachable only through pagination sits deep. A link from the category page or from a bestseller list shortens the path to 2.

Sources

  1. Google click depth matters more than URL structure – Search Engine Journal (06/2018)searchenginejournal.com
  2. Link best practices for Google – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
  3. Optimize your crawl budget – Google Crawling Infrastructuredevelopers.google.com

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