It’s best to keep your crawl depth below 5. The farther away a page is from the homepage, the less likely Google is to visit it or deem it as important.

Crawl depth refers to the number of clicks a user needs to make after landing on your homepage to visit the specific page in question. In general, the “deeper” a link is on the site, the harder it is to find. As such, Googlebot will also consider this content as less valuable—websites with good user experience are usually not difficult for visitors to navigate. This is especially important to remember on larger websites that Google does not crawl wholly every single time.

It’s important to note that both search engine bots and users can start exploring the website from any page, not just the homepage. In that case, the “crawl depth” would be a different number. However, analyzing the crawl depth starting with the homepage is usually the best indicator of how strong internal linking structures are.

If you have a valuable page that takes 5 or more clicks to reach, consider adding additional links to it from pages higher up in your website’s architecture to make it more easily accessible for both users and search engines. Additionally, don’t forget to list all of your important pages in your XML sitemap.

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