The fix, in one snippet
<nav aria-label="Popular guides">
<a href="/guides/arch-support">Arch support</a>
</nav>Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
The crawler records how many links it had to follow from the starting URL to reach each page. This check lists pages at depth three or more. Depth is measured through the shortest path the crawl found, which is the same measure a search engine uses.
It is reported as information, not a failure. Deep pages are normal in a large catalogue; what matters is whether the pages you care about are among them.
Why it matters
Crawl depth is a rough proxy for importance, and search engines treat it that way. Pages close to the homepage are recrawled more often and inherit more authority through the link graph; pages five levels down are visited rarely and rank on their own merits alone.
It is also a proxy for whether anyone can find the page. A reader who has to click five times through category pages to reach an article usually does not.
The depth figure here is relative to the URL you scanned. Starting from a deep section page will report shallower depths than starting from the homepage.
How to fix it
Shorten the path to the pages that matter. The cheapest interventions are usually structural rather than editorial:
<!-- surface the important pages directly -->
<nav aria-label="Popular guides">
<a href="/guides/arch-support">Arch support</a>
<a href="/guides/running-shoes">Running shoes</a>
</nav>Add contextual links between related pages so they do not depend on the category hierarchy alone. Keep paginated archives shallow by linking to the last page as well as the next one. For very large catalogues, hub pages that group related items are more effective than deeper nesting.
Where this fits
Pages buried deep in the structure is check 7 of 7 that the seo & site health audit runs under links and site structure, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Internal anchor text repetition (info), where every link to a page using the same words tells search engines one thing about it, repeatedly. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error, and Duplicate body content, where two pages with identical body text are one page at two addresses, and search engines will pick one of them for you. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Pages buried deep in the structure (info severity)
Scanner check id: seo-crawl-depthThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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