Buried 6 clicks deep, fixed it in an afternoon

Buried 6 clicks deep, fixed it in an afternoon

SaaS docs client. Help articles sat at /docs/category/subcategory/group/article — 5 folders, 6 clicks from home. Googlebot was crawling them once every 40+ days per the logs.

What I did:
— Killed two middle folders, moved articles to /docs/article-slug
— 301'd old paths, updated the in-app help widget links
— Resubmitted the docs sitemap

11 days later: median crawl interval dropped to 6 days. Six weeks out, 28 of those articles that had never ranked were sitting page 2-3 and pulling ~900 clicks/mo combined.

Watch your redirects — the app's hardcoded help links will throw chains if you don't update them too.