Crawl depth vs. click depth: the metric people conflate

Crawl depth vs. click depth: the metric people conflate

Across 134 domains, crawl depth (hops from the crawl seed) and click depth (shortest path from homepage) correlated at only r=0.62 — weaker than most assume.

— Pages at click-depth ≤3, indexed: 88.0% ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░
— Click-depth 4–6, indexed: 67.4% ▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░
— Click-depth 7+, indexed: 41.9% ▓▓▓▓░░░░░░

Crawl depth showed no such clean gradient — it depends on where the crawler started.

So what: click depth from the homepage is the indexation-relevant metric; crawl depth is a crawler artifact. When a tool reports "depth," check which it means. Optimize the shortest real-user path to money pages — every level past 3 costs ~10–20pt of indexation. Hub pages and contextual links flatten this faster than nav-bar bloat.