Links: Pages With High Crawl Depth

Pages that have a high crawl depth from the start page of the crawl based upon the ‘Crawl Depth’ preferences which are set at 4 or above.

Broadly, pages that are linked directly from popular pages, such as the homepage, are passed more PageRank which can help them perform better organically. Pages much deeper in the website can often be passed less PageRank, and subsequently may not perform as well.

This is important for key pages that are targeting broader more competitive queries, which may benefit from improved linking and reduced crawl depth. Unimportant pages, pages that target less competitive queries, or pages on large websites will often naturally sit deeper without issue.

Most importantly, consider the user, which pages are important for them to navigate to, and their journey to reach the page.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Links’ tab and ‘Pages With High Crawl Depth’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

To populate this filter ‘Crawl Analysis’ must be performed via ‘Crawl Analysis > Start’.

The crawl depth limit used for this filter can be adjusted via ‘Config > Spider > Preferences’. It’s set at above 3 by default, with the start page of a crawl assigned as ‘0’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when pages have a high crawl depth from the start page of the crawl, typically set at a depth of 4 or above.

How To Fix

Review pages that are deeper in the website with a high crawl depth. Improve website structure and internal linking to key pages that may benefit where appropriate.