"Every page should be 3 clicks from the homepage."

"Every page should be 3 clicks from the homepage."

Useful rule of thumb. Tested poorly.

A publisher with 11,400 articles measured it. 2,800 pages sat 5+ clicks deep. Instead of restructuring everything, they added contextual links from high-authority hub pages to a randomized 1,400 of those deep pages, leaving the other 1,400 buried as a control.

Ninety days later: the linked-up group saw indexed-and-receiving-clicks pages rise from 41% to 78%. The buried control crept from 41% to 44% (natural discovery).

Click depth wasn't the lever — internal link equity from indexed pages was. A page "3 clicks deep" via a footer link nobody crawls with priority is worse off than a page "6 clicks deep" linked from your top traffic article.

Stop counting clicks. Count whether real, crawled pages point at the orphan. They didn't, here, until someone made them.