Fixing Pages Buried Too Deep From the Homepage

Click depth is the fewest clicks it takes to reach a page by following links from the homepage. A page five or six clicks down can still be found and indexed, but it is harder for visitors to reach, it tends to be crawled less often, and your own structure is quietly telling search engines it is not very important.

Deep pages are rarely caused by one bad link. They come from long paginated lists, categories nested inside categories, and navigation that stops at the top level. This guide shows how to find the cause and bring valuable pages closer.

By John Carlsson · Updated 28 September 2026 · About 13 minutes to read

📋 Demo 📘 Tutorial 📖 Guide 📚 Book 🔧 Fix

In this guide

What click depth is, and what it is not
The usual causes
The fix, step by step
Getting pagination right
Platform notes
Edge cases
Questions and answers

What click depth is, and what it is not

Click depth is measured from the homepage along ordinary links. The homepage is depth 0, pages it links to are depth 1, pages those link to are depth 2, and so on. The Internal Link Analysis measures this for every crawled page by following links the way a crawler does, and it records the shortest route it found.

A few points are worth being clear about before you change anything:

It is the shortest path, not the usual one. A product might be six clicks away through the category tree but two clicks away through a "bestsellers" link on the homepage. The analysis reports two.
It is not the number of slashes in the URL. /shop/garden/tools/hand/trowels/steel-trowel looks deep, but if the homepage links straight to it, its click depth is 1. URL folders and click depth are separate things, and you do not need to change URLs to fix depth.
There is no official limit. Google has not published a maximum depth. Its representatives have said that pages linked more closely to the homepage tend to be treated as more important, which is logical: your own links are a statement about priority. Many practitioners aim to keep important pages within about three clicks, as a working rule of thumb rather than a threshold.
Sitemaps do not change it. An XML sitemap helps search engines discover URLs, but it contains no links in the navigational sense. A page listed in your sitemap and reachable only through ten pages of pagination is still deep.

Depth matters most for pages that earn money or answer common questions. A 2019 press release at depth 7 is not a problem worth solving. Your main service page at depth 4 is.

The usual causes

Cause	How it shows up in the audit	Typical fix
Long paginated lists	Blog posts or products at depths 5 to 20, rising steadily with age or position in the list	More items per page, better sorting, category entry points, links to page ranges
Nested categories	Everything inside a sub-sub-category is at least 4 deep before pagination even starts	Merge thin levels, link popular sub-categories from higher up
Top-level-only navigation	Main menu reaches sections, but nothing below them is linked site-wide	Second-level menu items for the most important pages, or hub pages
Pages reached only through search or filters	Pages found only because the crawler followed a filter link, or not found at all	Plain links from a category or hub page
JavaScript "load more" buttons	Items after the first batch are missing or very deep	Paginated URLs with real links behind the button
Chains of step-by-step content	Part 1 links to part 2, part 2 to part 3, and so on	A contents page linking to every part

Pagination is by far the most common cause on blogs and shops. If a listing shows ten items per page and each page links only to the next and previous pages, the fiftieth item needs five clicks from the listing, plus however deep the listing itself sits. Old content drifts deeper every time you publish something new.

💡 Sort your audit export by depth and look at what sits at the deepest levels. If it is almost all old blog posts or products from the end of a category, pagination is your problem. If it is a mixture of page types, look at the menu and category tree instead.

The fix, step by step

Step 1

List deep pages that actually matter

Run the Internal Link Analysis and export each page with its click depth and incoming internal links. Add Search Console clicks and impressions, and a column for business value such as high, medium or low. Filter to pages at depth 4 or more and remove anything you would happily see dropped from search, such as expired offers or thin tag archives. What remains is a short list of pages that deserve to be closer to the surface, which keeps the rest of the work focused.

Step 2

Trace the path the crawler took to each one

For each page on the list, find which page linked to it at the depth just above, then which page linked to that, back to the homepage. Many crawl tools show the inlinks for each URL, which makes this quick. Write the chain down, for example home, shop, garden, tools, page 4 of tools, product. The weakest link in the chain, often a paginated page or an extra category level, tells you exactly where the fix belongs, so you do not redesign the whole site to solve one gap.

Step 3

Shorten paginated listings

If pagination is in the chain, raise the number of items per page where the page still loads quickly, and add numbered links to several pages rather than only next and previous, such as links to pages 1 to 5 and the last page. Make sure each paginated page has its own crawlable URL like ?page=3 or /page/3/, a self-referencing canonical and normal links to the items on it. Do not canonicalise page 2 onwards to page 1, because that hides the items listed there.

Step 4

Flatten nested categories where they add nothing

Look for category levels that contain only one or two child categories, or a handful of items, and exist only because someone planned for growth that never came. Merge those levels into their parent and redirect the removed category URLs with 301s. Where a deep sub-category is genuinely useful, link it directly from the top-level category page or the menu so it no longer relies on passing through an intermediate level that visitors rarely use anyway.

Step 5

Add hub pages and links from shallow pages

For groups of deep pages that belong together, create or improve a hub page that introduces the subject and links to each of them with a short description, then link that hub from the main menu or homepage. Also add contextual links from pages already at depth 1 or 2 that discuss the subject. A single link from a shallow, relevant page cuts depth for that destination at once, without any change to menus or templates, which makes this the quickest win for individual pages.

Step 6

Use breadcrumbs and an HTML sitemap as support

Breadcrumbs link each page back up its category path. They mainly help visitors and crawlers move upwards, so they rarely make a deep page shallower, but they connect sibling sections and reinforce your structure. An HTML sitemap page, linked in the footer, can list your key sections and pages so each is at most two clicks from the homepage. Keep it to pages people genuinely look for; a list of thousands of URLs is unusable for visitors and adds little.

Step 7

Re-crawl and compare depth before and after

Once the changes are live, run the Internal Link Analysis again and compare the depth of every page on your list with your first export. Check that important pages now sit at a shallow depth, that redirected category URLs are no longer linked internally, and that nothing new became orphaned when you merged levels. Watch Search Console over the following weeks for the pages you moved, looking at crawl activity and impressions rather than expecting instant ranking changes.

Getting pagination right

Pagination deserves its own section because it creates most deep pages and because advice about it has changed. In 2019 Google said it had not been using rel="next" and rel="prev" as an indexing signal for some time. Those tags do no harm and other search engines may still read them, but they will not fix depth for Google. What matters is that each page of the series is a real page with real links.

A crawl-friendly paginated listing looks like this:

<!-- On https://example.co.uk/blog/page/3/ -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.co.uk/blog/page/3/">
...
<nav aria-label="Blog pages">
  <a href="/blog/">1</a>
  <a href="/blog/page/2/">2</a>
  <span aria-current="page">3</span>
  <a href="/blog/page/4/">4</a>
  <a href="/blog/page/5/">5</a>
  <a href="/blog/page/12/">12</a>
</nav>

Compare that with "Next" and "Previous" only: to reach page 12 a crawler would need eleven clicks from page 1. With numbered links to nearby pages and the last page, it takes far fewer.

Infinite scroll and "load more"

Infinite scroll is fine for visitors, but crawlers do not scroll or press buttons. If items beyond the first batch are loaded only by JavaScript, they may not be linked at all. The safe pattern is to back infinite scroll with ordinary paginated URLs: each batch corresponds to a page such as ?page=2, the "load more" button is a real link to that URL, and the address bar updates as the visitor scrolls. That way both people and crawlers can reach every item.

Sorting choices

What appears on page 1 of a listing is effectively shallow; everything else is deeper. Newest-first sorting pushes older material down permanently. For shops, sorting by popularity or a hand-set order can keep strong products near the top. For blogs, pinning or featuring evergreen posts on the listing, or linking them from category introductions, keeps them reachable regardless of date.

Platform notes

WordPress

The number of posts on each listing page is set under Settings, Reading, in "Blog pages show at most". Many themes use the core pagination function, which already outputs numbered links; if yours only shows "Older posts", a child theme or a pagination block can change that. Category archives are often reached only through a sidebar widget, so consider adding main categories to the menu. The Query Loop block lets you build curated lists of posts on hub pages.

Shopify

Collection pages are paginated by the theme, and the number of products per page is usually a theme setting or a value in the collection template. Shopify supports nested menus under Online Store, Navigation, which is the simplest way to put important collections one level below the top of the menu. Products are reachable through several URL forms, including inside collections; internal links and canonicals should point to the plain /products/ address. The product page linking guide covers related products and cross-links.

Custom sites and frameworks

In frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt or SvelteKit, check that listing pages are rendered with real <a href> links in the server response, not built only in the browser. Client-side routers usually render anchors correctly, but custom components that navigate on click with no href break the link graph entirely. Generate paginated routes as static or server-rendered pages rather than relying on a single URL with scripted paging.

Edge cases

Very large sites

A site with tens of thousands of products cannot put everything within three clicks through menus alone, and it does not need to. Aim for every category and your important items to be shallow, and for the rest to be reachable through a sensible category path, related-item links and paginated listings. The crawl budget guide covers how large sites keep crawlers focused on useful URLs.

Filter and faceted navigation

Filters by colour, size or price can create huge numbers of URLs, and a crawler that follows them may find items through long filter chains. Depth measured through filters is misleading. Give each item a plain path through categories, and keep filter combinations that you do not want crawled out of the link graph, for example by applying filters without generating new crawlable links.

Pages that are deep on purpose

Terms for past promotions, archived policy versions or old event pages can sit deep without harm. If a page is deep because it no longer matters, the fix may be to retire it rather than to raise it. The orphan pages guide covers deciding whether to keep, merge or remove content that has lost its links.

⚠️ Adding every deep page to the main menu or footer cures depth by creating a different problem: menus with hundreds of links on every page. Use hubs, category introductions and contextual links for most pages, and keep site-wide navigation for the handful of sections that matter most.

Questions and answers

1. What click depth is too deep?

Google has not published a limit, so there is no official answer. A common working rule is to keep important pages within about three clicks of the homepage, and to treat anything at five or more as worth checking. The rule matters far more for pages that earn money or answer popular questions than for archive material. A key service page at depth four deserves attention; an old news post at depth eight usually does not.

2. Does URL structure affect click depth?

No. Click depth is counted in links followed, not in folders in the address. A page at a long URL with many slashes can be one click from the homepage if the homepage links to it, while a short URL can be buried under ten paginated pages. You can fix depth by changing links, menus and listings without touching any URLs. Changing URLs to look flatter adds redirect work and does nothing for depth on its own.

3. Will an XML sitemap fix deep pages?

It helps search engines discover the URLs, but it does not change click depth or the signals your internal links send. A sitemap is a list of addresses, not part of your navigation, and visitors never see it. A page that exists only in the sitemap, or sits behind many pages of pagination, is still weakly linked. Keep the sitemap accurate, and treat it as a backup for discovery rather than a replacement for links.

4. Should I use infinite scroll or pagination?

Either can work for visitors. For search engines, what matters is that every item can be reached through ordinary links without scrolling or clicking buttons. If you use infinite scroll or a load more button, back it with paginated URLs such as page 2 and page 3 that load on their own and link to the items they contain. Plain numbered pagination with links to several nearby pages is the simplest reliable option.

5. Does rel=next and rel=prev still help with pagination?

Google said in 2019 that it had not used these tags as an indexing signal for some time, so they will not fix depth for Google. They are harmless to keep, and some other search engines and browsers may still read them. What actually helps is making each paginated page a real, crawlable page with its own URL and self-referencing canonical, and linking to several pages in the series rather than only the next and previous ones.

6. Do breadcrumbs reduce click depth?

Rarely for the page itself, because breadcrumbs link upwards to parent categories, which are already shallower. They do help in other ways: they give visitors a clear way back up, connect pages to their section, and appear on every page in a consistent form. Google can also show breadcrumb paths in search results when you add breadcrumb structured data. Use them alongside hub pages and contextual links rather than expecting them to solve depth alone.

7. How quickly will fixing depth affect my rankings?

There is no fixed timescale, and changing depth is not a guaranteed ranking lever. Search engines first need to recrawl the pages whose links changed, which can take days or weeks. What you can measure quickly is the new structure itself, by re-running the Internal Link Analysis. Then compare crawl activity and impressions in Search Console for the pages you moved over the next couple of months, against a similar earlier period.

Measure click depth across your site

The Internal Link Analysis maps every internal link across your crawled pages, measures click depth, rates anchor text, counts links in and out of each page and finds orphans, broken links and over-linked pages.

Open Internal Linking Fixes →