SiteAud!tLint Support

Opportunity Internal Linking

Deep page (more than 4 clicks)

Severity
Opportunity
Impact
Medium
Effort to fix
Medium
Issue code
deep_page

Why it matters

Pages far from the homepage are crawled less often and are usually seen as less important.

How to fix it

Add links from higher-level pages, category hubs or navigation to reduce click depth.

What this means

The page is more than 4 clicks from the start URL. The evidence shows its depth, for example "Depth 6": the shortest path through internal links from the start page takes six clicks.

Pages found only through the XML sitemap have no click depth and are reported as orphan pages instead.

Why it matters

  • Crawl priority. Search engines tend to crawl pages closer to the home page more often. Deep pages are discovered and refreshed later.
  • Link value. Each step away from strong pages passes less internal link value.
  • Visitors rarely click five or six levels deep to find something.

Depth matters most for pages you want to rank. A deep archive page from years ago is expected; a deep product or service page is a problem.

Common causes

  • Long pagination. Item 400 in a category is on page 20, so it is 20 clicks away.
  • Narrow category trees with many levels and few links across them.
  • Important pages linked only from other deep pages, such as a guide that is only reachable from an old blog post.

How to fix it

  1. Link important deep pages from shallower ones: the home page, main category pages, hub pages, or the menu.
  2. Add cross-links between related pages, such as related products and related articles, so there are shorter paths.
  3. Shorten pagination: show more items per page, add links to page numbers further ahead, or split large categories into subcategories.
  4. Build hub pages that link to every page in a topic.

Verify the fix

Recrawl from the same start URL. The evidence shows the new depth of each page, and pages at depth 4 or less drop out of the issue.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the Internal Linking score 0.5 points, plus up to 4 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. A smaller improvement with a modest effect on its own.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Deep page (more than 4 clicks). Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (medium) and effort (medium), and in the issues CSV under the code deep_page. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.

Guides that cover this issue