Click depth

The two get confused constantly. /a/b/c/d/page/ has five folders in the URL but may sit one click from the homepage if something on the front page links to it. Conversely a URL like /offer/ looks shallow and can be six clicks away if the only route runs through a paginated archive.

Search engines follow links, not slashes. Restructuring URLs to look shallower changes nothing; adding a link does.

The common rule of thumb is three clicks. Treat it as a heuristic rather than a threshold — nothing breaks at four. What is reliably true is the direction: each additional level means less frequent crawling and a smaller inherited share.

A workable target for most sites: every page you want to rank within three clicks, everything else within five. Anything beyond that should be there on purpose. Pages reachable only through page seven of a paginated archive are the classic case — technically not orphaned, but close enough to be treated the same way.

Any crawler that starts at the homepage reports it — Screaming Frog calls the column Crawl Depth, Sitebulb shows the distribution as a chart. Sort descending and look at what sits at the bottom.

The fix is almost never a navigation change. Adding menu entries makes every page heavier and dilutes the links that already exist. The cheaper move is a handful of contextual links from well-linked pages: one link from a page at depth one puts the target at depth two immediately.

Hub pages work for the same reason. A single well-placed overview that links thirty deep pages lifts all thirty at once — which is what a topic cluster does structurally.