Case: inserting 90 hub pages between root and 18,000 leaves cut crawl depth in half

Case: inserting 90 hub pages between root and 18,000 leaves cut crawl depth in half

Flat architecture: homepage linked to category, category linked to 18,000 leaves directly. Deepest pages sat at click-depth 6. Restructure:

— Step 1 (analyst): mapped click-depth distribution. Gate: any leaf at depth >4 = too deep.
— Step 2 (architect): designed a mid-tier of 90 hubs grouping leaves by attribute (region x type). Gate: each hub holds 150-300 leaves, no more.
— Step 3 (dev): wired homepage to hubs, hubs to leaves, leaves cross-linked to 5 siblings.
— Step 4 (QA): re-crawled, confirmed max depth.

Outcome: max click-depth 6 to 3. Indexed leaf count +27% in 9 weeks. Hub pages themselves began ranking for mid-tail terms, adding a new traffic layer.

Guardrail: cap hub fan-out at ~300 links, or the hub itself becomes a thin link-dump.

Ship gate: don't publish until all boxes are checked.