There are many factors that can influence the ranking of a web page on search engines. A factor that is overlooked by many webmasters is the click depth.
What is click depth?
Sometimes called “click distance”, click depth is the number of clicks it takes to get to a web page from the home page of your web site. If you need 5 clicks from your home page to go to page A and 2 clicks from you home page to get to page B then page B has a larger click depth than page A. Why is click depth important?
Some search engines (including Google) seem to take click depth into account when calculating the ranking of web pages. The lower the click depth, the more value is given to a web page.
In addition to the click depth, some search engines might also take the directory structure into account.
A web page with the URL www.example.com/page.htm is considered more important than a page with a URL that points to a subfolder: www.example.com/here/there/whereever/page.htm
How can you influence the click depth on your web site?
It’s likely that a clean site with less click depth gets better Google rankings than a site with a cluttered navigation.
An easy way to make every page of your web site available with at most two clicks is putting a sitemap link on every web page. Using Google’s Sitemaps service doesn’t help because it does not change the click depth of your web site. You have to put a normal sitemap on your web site.
If you use a normal sitemap on your web site then you don’t have to participate in Google’s Sitemaps program because Google will find all of your pages through your regular sitemap.
Where can I learn more about click depth?
Search Engine Journal has an interesting article entitled SEO and Click Distance.
[Update 2021] They also have a more recent article entitled Click Depth: Is It a Google Ranking Factor?
