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SiteAnalyzer's «Crawl Depth» data identifies content buried in your site architecture and helps you find internal linking opportunities.
Often times on larger sites, it's extremely common for content to get buried deep in the site architecture. As your content library expands you'll likely see more content get obscured in different sections, via pagination or not receive natural linking.
Generally, it's recommended that content have a «Crawl Depth» of no more than 3-4. This means that any piece of content shouldn't be more than 3-4 links away from the home page. If you find content with higher crawl depths, you might want to consider adding internal links to those pages.
Fortunately, SiteAnalyzer can help you identify content with high crawl depth:
1. Open up SiteAnalyzer and perform a crawl of your site.
2. Once the crawl is complete go to Internal > HTML.
3. Scroll to the right to find the «Nesting Level» report. Sort this is descending order.
4. You'll now see the pages on your site with the deepest crawl depths.
5. If you see content with a crawl depth of 5+, you'll want to consider ways you can internally link to it.
Many overlook crawl depth, but it’s essential for ensuring key content stays accessible. Improving internal linking can truly revitalize neglected pages and boost their visibility!
In the past, we've used to identify entire sections of sites that have poor internal linking. We would see the same page types / templates that had deep crawl depths, indicating they weren't getting linked to naturally. Next, we had to brainstorm scalable ways of linking to that content.
Great tip! Another key takeaway is that reducing crawl depth not only makes your content more accessible to search engines but also improves user experience. Pages closer to the homepage are generally seen as more valuable, so surfacing high-value content through better internal linking can boost both SEO and engagement.
Analyze «Crawl Depth» with SiteAnalyzer...
P.S. If you export the the internal links of each page to can you can ask SiteAnalyzer to run a PageRank analysis on the link network. This will tell you how much link equity each URL receives.
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