Cut product depth from 5 clicks to 2. Indexation hit 96%.

Cut product depth from 5 clicks to 2. Indexation hit 96%.

Marketplace had products buried under region/city/category/sub/product. Average product was 5 clicks from home. GSC said only 61% of products were indexed — the rest too deep to get crawled.

What I did:
— Flattened products to /product/slug, decoupled from the location tree
— Built category hubs that link directly to products (2 clicks max)
— Kept location pages as filters, not as the canonical path

3 months: indexation went 61% → 96%. The newly-indexed products added ~5,800 clicks/mo of long-tail.

Click depth is a real ranking-adjacent signal. If it's 4+ clicks deep, Google treats it as low priority. Get money pages within 2-3.