Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is, what is crawl depth? The reason why I want to talk about crawl depth today is I've been reading a lot about technical SEO, trying to understand a little bit more about crawling indexing, refreshing my own memory. And so, when I was reading these articles and these literatures, I kept stumbling upon crawl depth, and I realized, "Huh, we probably should make a video about that on the channel." So, that's what we're doing today.
But before we begin, I want to introduce the team. We have a day. This is a recurring guest, Teavana casing, but this is not Teavana tea, we just use the case. We have a green tea... You probably can't even see if I do this, but we have a green tea that was gifted to my family from our distant, distant relatives in China. My family is about seven generations removed from our... when last time we lived in China, but we do have distant relatives who live there. My father went back, I went to go visit them and they gifted us some tea. So, thank you to our fellow clan from our family who reconnected with us in China and gifted us this tea.
But let's go ahead and get talking, get brewing, and discussing what crawl depth is. So, what is crawl depth? Crawl depth is a really technical way of saying, how many layers deep is a page on a website, right? So, let me put it this way. When a crawler crawls your website, they will usually go through your homepage. Then they go through the homepage, they find all the links on the homepage, and they crawled all those links on that homepage and go one layer deeper. And then once they find all those links, then they keep going deeper.
So, what the crawlers really do is that they're finding links on every page and then going down the rabbit hole of each one. I always have to think of a hierarchal structure. Here's your homepage, it navigates... It comes down to a structure of, about us, services, contact us, blog, and then on about us or services, you probably have other services that are there, so those crawl down to more services and so on and so forth. Right? So crawl depth is, to me, in layman's terms, how many navigational clicks it takes to get to that page. Now that can be a simplification, but if you're just trying to understand as not a robot, but as a normal web user, that's how I understand it, is how many clicks does it take to get from the homepage to the page in question?
Now, the reason why this is important is because in another video I talked about orphan pages, but what the other issue is, you can have a page that's not orphaned, but it has way too many clicks to get to it, right? So, in order to get to this specific product page or blog post, let's say you have to go to the homepage, go to promotions, deals, this specific time, let's say, holidays of 2019, then you would find it in this subsection of the product area. That's four or five clicks deep, right?
And so the reason why this is important is, the recommended crawl depth for any page is about three. Three or higher, three, two, one, right? The problem is when a site gets messy and it gets too large, the crawl depth can go all over the place where you're starting to create pages where you don't even realize how many clicks it would take to get there from the homepage.
You'll see some extreme examples online from other SEOs whose show pages all like 15 to 20 pages deep in terms of the crawl depth. And so the reason why this is important is, crawl depth is not something you technically can just fix it in one go, you have to kind of structurally fix the whole website. So, the best you can do is as you build and make your site stronger, always keep in mind the overall structure and ensure that entire sections of the site or pages you're adding can be navigatable from the home page. And ideally, three pages in terms of crawl... I mean, three layers in terms of crawl depth, deep. And the implications of why this is important is because when Google is crawling your website, they need to be able to understand what's going on. And the farther a page pages away from the top layer of crawl depth, the less value that they assigned that page. Because in their mind, if the page is so hard to navigate to, it probably must not be a very important page for your website.
So, that's why a lot of SEOs recommend having a crawl depth at a maximum of three layers deep, because that will maintain all the priority. Three layers is pretty high on the priority list without diluting any of the value if you go too wide. So in that case, the better Google can understand your structure and have a crawl depth that's much smaller, they can better understand what's going on, use your internal linking silos... I've created videos about that before and create a crawl depth that's three and less so that Google understands the structure, they understand the priority list, and therefore you don't have any pages that are so wide off that, though you may want them to rank, Google doesn't see the value of them. Or if you have pages that have a wide crawl depth, but they don't really matter to you, consider deleting them or consider changing the structure. Just so they're not so deep.
A large crawl depth isn't the killer, but when you have it rampant across your site, it can really affect pages you're trying to rank and just your overall rankings, because things will get messy. So crawl depth again is, I always like to think of it as a web structure, a homepage, your navigational menu, and then as it comes down to the other pages, you want to keep crawl depth to three. Try your best. Sometimes it's impossible, but try to keep it at three and then just try not to have anything extreme, like crawled depth of 10 or 15. And if you want more information, there's a lot of great technical literature out there. I really encourage you to Google them. These videos are more meant for layman's terms. So I want to keep it more basic. If you want to go deep dive into it, again, look up some literature online. There's a lot of great stuff there. But hopefully that was a great intro or just a little basic foundation for what crawl depth is. I'm going to go pour out my tea now and start drinking a little bit. But if you found the video valuable, please like and subscribe and I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks everybody.