The essence of this chapter is to further explain Chapter 2 Web Page Structure, and also to explain the layout considerations in the simplest project.
In SEO, click depth (Click Depth) and traffic weight (Traffic Weight) are two closely related indicators that have a significant impact on website rankings.
What is click depth?
Click depth refers to the number of clicks it takes for a user to get from the homepage of a website to a specific page. For example:
- The click depth of the home page is 0
- The click depth of the page directly linked to the homepage is 1
- The click depth of pages that need to be accessed through the path of home page → category page → content page is 2
Click depth is an important indicator to measure the flatness of the website structure, and is also a direct reflection of the difficulty of search engine spiders crawling the website content.
What is traffic weight?
Traffic weight is a value assessment assigned by search engines to a web page, reflecting the importance of the page in the entire website. Traffic weight is affected by many factors, including but not limited to:
- Number of internal links the page has received
- The weight of the link source page
- Quality of external links to the page
- Relevance and quality of page content
- User behavior signals (such as dwell time, bounce rate)
How click depth affects traffic weight
1. Weight transfer attenuation
Search engines follow the "distance decay" principle when transferring page weight. As the click depth increases, the weight passed from the home page will gradually decrease:
Home page weight → first-level page (attenuated by 20-30%) → second-level page (then attenuated by 20-30%) → ...This means that the greater the click depth, the less weight the page will receive from the site as a whole.
2. Crawler crawling frequency
Search engine spiders usually crawl pages with lower click depth first and more frequently. Pages with too high click depth may face the following problems:
- Reduced frequency of being crawled
- Increased latency in being indexed after content is updated
- May not even be fully crawled in some cases
3. User experience factors
Click depth also directly affects user experience:
- Pages with lower depth generally get more organic traffic
- Make it easier for users to find and access these pages
- Good user experience signals (such as lower bounce rate) will positively feed back to page authority
The impact of page layout and link position on weight
When discussing click depth, an often overlooked but actually very important factor is the location of the link on the page. Even for pages with the same click depth, the traffic and weight they receive may vary significantly depending on the link position.
Page area weight difference
Search engines will give different weights to links based on their position on the page:
Header (page header) area link: usually gets the highest weight
- Located at the top of the page, it is the first area users see
- Present on almost every page of the website
- Search engines regard it as the most important navigation structure of the website
Footer (footer) area link: obtains medium to high weight
- Although located at the bottom of the page, it also appears on most pages
- Usually contains links to the core pages of the website
- Search engines consider footer links to represent important structure of the website
Main content area link: weight depends on context
- Links that appear naturally within the content usually receive higher weight
- Relevant contextual links are seen as more valuable
- Links carefully selected by editors have higher weight than automatically generated links to related articles
Sidebar links: usually have lower weight
- Often used to display ads or secondary content
- May vary between pages
-Search engines treat it as secondary navigation
The internal page traffic ranking of the website will almost certainly follow the weight calculated comprehensively from the layout, click depth, and link position (unless there are external changes, such as advertising on a certain page, buying external links, or social media explosion), so it is necessary to favor this weight as much as possible and highlight the core pages.
Best Practices
In the layout, each page consists of three tags: header, main, and footer, which form the most basic weight expression.
Header and Footer remain consistent throughout the website. This consistent structure indicates to search engines that the links within are important.
In Header is the main navigation of the website and some mainly recommended functional navigation. In Footer is a series of articles that need to be strongly promoted on the webpage (words you want to grab, articles with large search volume words, or landing pages).
Compress all pages that are not important enough (can be articles, landing pages) to secondary pages for deeper click depth, and reserve more space for Footer or Header.
As for the content in Main, just complete the main function naturally.