<b>How fast does internal link equity decay by click-depth?</b>

<b>How fast does internal link equity decay by click-depth?</b>

Everyone repeats "keep pages within 3 clicks of home." But the decay curve matters more than the threshold.

I mapped click-depth-from-homepage against indexation rate and average position for ~14,000 URLs across 7 content sites, holding content quality roughly constant by sampling within the same templates.

— Indexation rate stayed above 95% through depth 4, then fell sharply: 78% at depth 5, 54% at depth 6+.
— Average position degraded almost linearly, ~0.8 positions worse per additional click of depth.
— The cliff was steeper on sites with flat, paginated archives than on sites with curated hub pages — same depth, different outcome.

So depth isn't destiny; <i>how</i> you create depth is. Reaching depth 5 via a thoughtful hub-and-spoke structure indexed far better than reaching depth 5 via "page 12 of /blog." The crawler appears to read curated internal links as endorsements and pagination as filler.

Method note: depth computed via BFS on internal link graph from homepage; indexation checked via site: sampling and log files where available.

Confidence: medium — confounders (page age, external links) only partially controlled.