Does flattening a deep silo actually move rankings? One 2,400-page rebuild

Does flattening a deep silo actually move rankings? One 2,400-page rebuild

Question: a recipe site had its content buried four clicks deep (home → category → subcategory → tag → post). Would flattening the structure to two clicks help?

What was done: 2,400 posts re-linked so every URL sat within two clicks of a hub page. No new content, no new backlinks — pure internal architecture. The crawl-depth distribution shifted from a median of 4 clicks to 2.

Outcome over 90 days: Googlebot crawl requests to the formerly-deep URLs rose roughly 3.4x (server logs). Indexed pages went from 71% to 96% of the set. Median position on tracked queries improved from 18.2 to 11.6 — a meaningful but not transformative gain.

Caveat: crawl depth and topical relevance are confounded here. The flatter URLs also gained more contextual internal anchors, so we can't cleanly separate "depth" from "link equity." The crawl-rate signal is the cleanest takeaway.

Method note: server access logs (90 days pre/post) + a single rank-tracker cohort of 340 queries. Single site, no control.

Confidence: medium — strong crawl signal, confounded ranking signal.