Links & site structure
Pages buried deep in the site
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on a whole site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
- Based on
- Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.
What is wrong
Many of your pages are buried more than 4 clicks deep from your homepage—that is, you have to follow more than 4 links in succession to reach them from the start of your site. Search engines crawl pages by following links, and they have limits on how far down they will go. Pages buried deep are harder to find and may not get indexed at all.
Why it costs you
When pages aren't discovered by search engines, they don't appear in search results. Visitors who might find your content through Google will never know it exists. You also dilute the link authority flowing through your site, since it gets spread thinner the further out you go.
How to fix it
To fix this, create shorter paths to your important pages. Add navigation links or breadcrumb trails that get visitors (and search engines) to key content in fewer steps. If you have a template used across multiple pages—such as a sidebar or footer—edit that one template to link to deeper pages. You can also add a sitemap file (sitemap.xml) in your site root to give search engines a direct map of all pages, bypassing the link-following process.
What the audit tests
- Every indexable page is fewer than four clicks from the start page
Check your site
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