Crawl Depth

Crawl depth describes site structure, not how many seconds a crawler spends on a page. A homepage linked directly to a service page gives that page a depth of one from the homepage; a guide reached through category and archive pages may be several steps away. The result changes with the starting URL and whether links are crawlable.

Deep placement can reveal navigation problems: useful pages may be absent from primary sections, linked only through filters or isolated behind scripts. Improve architecture by creating descriptive category hubs, using ordinary HTML links and linking related material where it helps users. Google says crawlable links help its systems discover pages, but there is no universal official rule that every page must be three clicks from the homepage.

Depth tools may calculate a shortest link path from a crawl, which is not necessarily the route real visitors use. Crawl depth also differs from crawl budget, which concerns search-engine resources devoted to crawling. A page at low depth may still fail indexing for content or technical reasons.