Click Depth
The number of clicks needed to reach a page from the home page.
Analogy Mental model
How far a shop sits from the escalator. The one beside it gets the traffic; the one in the corner of the fifth floor gets none.
In practice What you actually do
Keep revenue pages within three clicks. Flat architecture, categories wide rather than deep, and navigation that reflects how buyers think rather than how the database is built. Every extra level halves the attention reaching the bottom.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Run a crawl depth report and look at the tail. Pages deeper than three are crawled rarely, accumulate almost no authority, and mostly exist without anyone noticing. Orphan pages, with no link at all, are worse.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →