Page Depth
There are more than a trillion (one million million) pages on the web, and the web grows by several billion additional pages every day.
Search engines can't index all these pages, so they need to make broad decisions about which pages to index before they even start looking at the quality of the pages themselves. One way they decide is by looking at how hard it is to reach the page. The deeper you bury a page in your site, the less likely the search engines are to include it in their index.
The general rule of thumb: A visitor should be able to get to every page on your site that you care about in no more than three clicks. The larger and more influential a site is, the more leeway its designers get in structuring the content. But most sites should not depart from the three-click rule.
How Search Engines Find New Pages
Major search engines like Google start their crawl of the web by examining a set of well-connected initial pages. They then follow each link they discover to new pages, and examine those. This process of examining pages and following links continues until they have a huge index of pages they believe are of interest to people searching the web.
Don't Make It Harder for Search Engines to Find Your Pages
- It takes search engines longer to discover websites that don't have many links from other sites. You can submit a sitemap to most of the search engines, which will help. But this isn't a replacement for getting DoFollow links from relevant, high-quality sites.
- It is extremely difficult to get a web page included in search results if there are no links to the page. Every page on your site that you care about should be linked to from other pages on your site.
- It's harder to get a page to appear in search results if it takes more than three clicks to get to it from a site's home page.
- Search engines follow redirects, but they will discount the value of a page every time they have to follow a redirect to get there. You should use redirects when necessary, but there are VERY few instances where you will want to use two or more redirects.
