Why is crawl depth or page depth important for SEO?
When you’re developing a website, navigation is essential. You have to consider the ease with which users can navigate to subpages from the site’s homepage and other landing pages.
The homepage is where most users will enter and exit the site. Your website’s performance will suffer if visitors can’t go to lower-level pages easily. It’s something called crawl depth, and it can impact your SEO.
What is crawl depth?
Crawl depth, also known as page depth, refers to the number of clicks it takes for users and search engine crawlers to access a page via its associated homepage. Since crawlers and visitors are less likely to reach deep pages, an excessive crawl depth may represent a significant issue for your search engine optimization efforts.
The rule of thumb is that if a page needs more than three clicks to reach it’s considered bad for SEO performance. These pages will be more difficult for search engines to crawl compared to a page that can be visited after only one click. Deep pages have a lower page rank than surface-level pages simply because search engines are less likely to uncover and crawl them. If a page is difficult to locate, web crawlers will not examine it as frequently either. As a result, the page’s chances of being ranked will be reduced.
How to find the depth of your pages
There are a few methods that you can use to determine the depth of your pages. The easiest option is to use a tool like evisio to find the average depth of your pages.
When you click to view the details you will get a listing all of your URLs with the depth of each URL.
Impact of page depth improvements
The user experience and search rankings are both impacted by page depth. Users want to readily access subpages, preferably within one or two clicks. If visitors want to get to a subpage on your website but it requires 4+ clicks to get there from the homepage, they’ll probably never reach the page. And they probably won’t find it on search results for direct access.
According to Mueller’s findings, Google places a higher value on subpages with a low page depth than on a large page depth. Low page depth signals to Google that the subpage contains pertinent information. That tells Google to give the subpage an increased amount of importance on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Final word on page crawl depth
You’re making site users work to find information if your website has a high average page depth. Don’t be surprised if relatively few people ever visit your subpages. Large page depth creates a poor user experience because it directs visitors through numerous internal links. Employing a low navigational structure, internal links within content, and breadcrumbs will reduce the average page depth of your website and improve the user experience.
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