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Crawl Depth

The number of clicks a page sits away from the start URL, usually the homepage.

CrawlerCrawling & Technical SEOAlso known as: Click depth, Page depth

Definition

Crawl depth counts the link hops between the seed URL and a page. The homepage is depth 0, pages it links to are depth 1, and so on.

Most crawlers let you cap the depth to keep a crawl small. Depth 0 means fetch only the URLs you supplied and follow nothing.

Why It Matters

Pages buried many clicks deep tend to be crawled less often and receive less internal link equity. Important pages should sit close to the homepage.

A sudden jump in depth after a redesign often means navigation links were removed.

How VisibilityKit Helps

VisibilityKit Crawler records the depth of every URL it finds, so you can spot important pages that are buried too deep. Setting depth to 0 turns a crawl into a URL list check.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good crawl depth?

Keep key pages within three clicks of the homepage where you can. There is no hard rule, but deeper pages get less attention.

Is crawl depth the same as URL folder depth?

No. Folder depth is how many slashes are in the path. Crawl depth is how many clicks it takes to reach the page.

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Put these terms to work

VisibilityKit Crawler

A desktop SEO crawler for macOS, Windows and Linux. Find what is broken, assign the work, then verify every fix. Crawl data stays on your machine.

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