Crawl Depth Optimization: Make Search Engines Index Pages You Want to Rank

Do you know 252,000 websites are created everyday across the world? How do you think Google discovers them and decides which ones to show up for user searches online?

To rank your web pages and show them in search results, Google has to first crawl and add them to its well over 100,000,000 GB of index in the first place.

The good news is you can grab the attention of Google crawlers even for the pages that aren’t crawled yet, which will ultimately speed up the ranking process.

Optimizing your website’s crawl depth is a great way to make it easier for these crawlers to get to your new pages. Additionally, crawl depth optimization will ensure that the important pages are crawled consistently, making sure new additions to the page get indexed faster, giving you better chances of ranking higher. 

Think of it this way. Suppose you enter a multistorey building. You identify that store you want to visit is on the 10th floor but the lift service ends on the 6th due to maintenance? Would you take the stairs or will you decide to come back tomorrow? If you aren’t a sprinter like Marion Jones you would probably choose the second option, right? This same concept applies to crawl depth. 

When Google finds that your important pages are at a crawl depth of 4-5, it may decide to skip it for another day. This results in the page getting inadequate crawler attention.

Without proper crawl depth optimization, things turn out bleak for your website as Google crawls end up indexing pages that you may not want to rank in the first place. 

Of course, Google’s crawlers have become efficient over time however, it’s still ideal to keep the crawl depth of your web pages at a maximum of 3 so that the crawl efficiency is maintained consistently. 

Note: If you are running an ecommerce store with thousands of products under many categories or subcategories, the concept of crawl depth may not be as important as the Google crawlers overtime learns about your website and adjusts the crawl budget accordingly.

So, in this blog post, I’ll tell you everything about web crawling, crawl depth, how to optimize it to improve your site crawl efficiency and more. 

Let’s get started.

Understanding Web Crawling

Before exploring crawl depth, let’s quickly talk about how web crawling works. Going forward, this will help you make sense of crawl depth optimization and its importance in SEO easily.

Web crawling is the process where search engine crawlers or spiders discover data from across the web by following links and navigating through web pages. The data discovered is then added to the search engine’s index or database.

Search engines like Google rely heavily on web crawling because that’s how they are able to locate ample new sources across the web, index them and show them up for relevant user searches online.

In today’s aggressively competitive online landscape, It is important to boost the crawl efficiency of your website to make it easily discoverable for web crawlers. That’s how you get them to crawl, index and rank your website.

Your website’s crawl depth plays a massively significant role in making or breaking its crawl efficiency and you have to optimize it in order to turn the table in your favor.

What is Crawl Depth?

Crawl depth refers to the number of links the search engine bot has to crawl through before it reaches a particular page on your website.

It is sometimes known as click depth, which is the measure of the number of clicks the user has to make to reach a specific page on your site.

Crawl depth is usually determined by the number of steps it takes to navigate to a particular page. Most often, the homepage is the starting point.   

For instance, a page you can land on directly from the homepage has a minimum crawl depth. On the flip side, a page that requires you to make several clicks across the website to reach it has a comparatively deeper crawl depth.

Why Crawl Depth Matters

Crawl depth strongly relates to user experience and the indexing and ranking of your web pages.

How?  

Imagine it this way. If the user has to click through several other pages to access an important page, such as a service page or a product listing page, they may grow impatient and frustrated. This will result in a poor user experience and affect your conversion rate considerably.  

Now that’s the same with search engine bots too. If they have to crawl multiple pages before they get to one of your important pages, that may exhaust your site’s crawl budget.

 As a result, the important pages on your site may not be crawled and indexed faster by the search engine. This will potentially affect the visibility of your important pages in SERPs.

So, if you haven’t optimized crawl depth, you are compromising on the indexing and ranking potential of your site and user experience, which you most certainly don’t want to do. 

Factors that affect crawl depth include poor site structure, improper or broken internal links, lack of XML sitemap implementation and more.

I’ll tell you more about these later in this article.

What Should Be the Ideal Crawl Depth of a Website?

Let’s face the truth. There’s no specific rule of thumb for crawl depth. But here’s the catch. 

As a minimum crawl depth makes it easier for web crawlers to locate and crawl your pages, I suggest keeping your priority pages as close to your home as possible.

If you still want a number, it is best to place your important pages at a maximum of 3 clicks away from your homepage.

Considering the crawl depth of your homepage as 0, the best practice is to maintain a crawl depth of 3 or less for the pages you want the search engine to crawl faster.

Also, make sure you add your important pages to the sitemap to signal the search engine to prioritize those pages when crawling your website.

Tips to Improve Crawl Depth 

 Now that you know how important crawl depth optimization is for your website, here’s a look at some effective tips to put it into action.

Improve Site Structure

A well-structured website with a simple and intuitive design makes it easier for search engine bots to conveniently navigate through your website and crawl your web pages efficiently. This will lead to the indexing and ranking of your content faster by the search engine and boosts its online visibility. 

Besides, a simple and attractive website also makes way for a hassle-free user experience and prompts your visitors to dig deeper into your website and explore your content. This will boost user engagement for your site and impact your conversion rate positively.

You can also implement breadcrumb navigation for the search engine and users alike to understand the hierarchy of your site. This too, will contribute to better crawling efficiency and improved user experience.

Analyze and Optimize Your Internal Links

Links within your website are an integral part of crawl depth optimization. After all, Google bots follow links to discover and crawl new pages.

Observing your existing internal linking structure closely will help you narrow down pages that aren’t properly linked to relevant pages within your site. Make sure you use appropriate keywords to create contextual links. When you give your internal links a clear context, you help the search engine to understand your content better.

Speaking of internal links, you don’t want the crawlers to follow one of your links just to find nothing, right? To stop that from happening, you need to fix broken links and ensure that the crawlers are rightly directed to relevant pages.

In case you’ve moved your content to a new URL destination, use 301 redirects to point the crawlers appropriately to the new page.

Prioritize Important Pages

As I mentioned earlier, you don’t want to exhaust your crawl budget before the search engine spiders get to your important pages. That’s why you have to signal them to crawl (or not to crawl) certain pages of your website. It is, of course, a great crawl depth control strategy.

But how do you do that? 

One, use robots.txt to specify the pages or directories you don’t want the search engine to crawl. This way, you can extend some control over the crawling behavior of the search engine bots and prompt them to skip pages that don’t need crawling.

Additionally, you can use canonical tags (rel=”canonical”) to prevent the crawlers from wasting the crawl budget on duplicate content. 

This will help you reduce crawl depth considerably and the crawl budget can be spent on important pages on your site, such as product/ service pages.

Two, create an effective XML sitemap that contains all your high-value, relevant pages. Unlike robots.txt, the existence of the XML sitemap signals search engines to prioritize pages contained in it when crawling your website.

This ensures that your important pages deliberately attract the attention of the crawlers. Again, as this strategy reduces the focus of the search engine bots on less important pages, it complements crawl depth optimization.

Optimize URL Structure

Keeping your URL depth shallow can make way for an efficient crawl depth optimization. 

If you aren’t familiar with URL depth, here’s a quick explanation for you. URL depth denotes the number of directories or subdirectories a URL contains.

Keep your URL depth minimum because search engine crawlers may interpret deeper URLs to be less significant. 

A shallow URL structure allows crawlers to easily access and crawl important pages, bolsters crawl depth optimization and ensures that your content is crawled and indexed.

Make sure you keep your URLs short, clear and descriptive. This will help web crawlers to understand your content without crawling extensively. 

Also, include relevant keywords in your URL to give it a clear context and improve the visibility of your page in search results.

Improve Site Speed

Improving your site speed is another good way to optimize crawl depth. Here’s how you do it.

Smaller image sizes prompt faster loading times. This will enhance crawl depth optimization by ensuring that crawlers can access more pages using the allocated crawl budget.

So, optimize your images by decreasing the size without losing quality. Ensure that you use widely supported image formats like JPEG and PNG.

Yet another way to improve site speed is minifying CSS and JavaScript files by removing unnecessary characters, whitespace, comments and more.

Just like image optimization, this method also comes in handy to minimize file sizes and contributes to a faster page loading time.

Apart from these, ad placements on your site also play a notable role in influencing your site speed. Pop-ups and excessive ads can slow down the page loading speed and affect the crawling process.

That said, make sure you avoid them as much as possible in order to boost crawl efficiency and get more of your pages indexed by the search engine.

How to Perform Crawl Depth Analysis?

So, how do you analyze the crawl depth of your content? I recommend the three ways below.

Using Web Crawling Tools

Web crawling tools, such as Screaming Frog, Moz and DeepCrawl can help you analyze the crawl depth of your website.

These tools allow you to get an overview of the crawl depth of your website, narrow down pages with shallow or deep crawl depth, and evaluate the overall distribution of crawl depth across your web pages. 

They help you comprehend how search engine bots view and navigate your site and also provide actionable insights to optimize crawl depth.

Log File Analysis

Log file analysis is the process of evaluating server logs to gain insights into how web crawlers interact with your website.

Using this method, you can identify the crawl depth of your web pages, check for crawl patterns and narrow down potential crawl issues, if any.

Overall, with log file analysis, you get a 360-degree view of how search engine crawlers perceive your site and pin down existing crawling issues to be fixed in order to optimize crawl depth.

Using Google Search Console

The Crawl Stats report in the Google Search Console lets you know Google’s crawl history of your website.

It provides a wide array of crawling statistics, including the number of requests made, kilobytes downloaded, average response time, issues encountered and much more.

With these insights from the Crawl Stats report, you identify similar patterns and potential issues when it comes to crawling your site and take the necessary steps to optimize crawl depth and accelerate the performance of your website.

Future Trends in Crawl Depth Optimization

As AI and machine learning technologies evolve at a pace faster than ever, they are likely to play a significant role in crawl depth optimization. AI-powered systems may potentially be equipped to weigh the website structure, prioritize important pages, and make intelligent decisions on crawl depth. 

Over time, machine learning models may transform even better and take part in enhancing crawl efficiency and making sure that search engines focus on crawling high-value, relevant content.

With mobile devices dominating the online space, it’s been some time since search engines shifted to mobile-first indexing. 

That said, optimizing crawl depth for mobile content will ensure that search engine spiders efficiently crawl and index mobile-friendly pages on your site. This will directly impact your site’s visibility on mobile devices.

Search engine algorithms constantly evolve to provide more relevant results and an overall improved search experience for users. As these algorithms prioritize quality and user-centric content, optimizing crawl depth becomes more critical. 

You need to align your crawl depth strategies in line with evolving algorithms to ensure that your important pages are effectively crawled and indexed, which will ultimately improve your search rankings and online discoverability.