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Does how deep a page is in the page hierarchy affect it's ranking? For example, if I click 5 times on a "show more" button to get to a certain page, would it be considered "deep" within the site page hierarchy and does this (negatively?) affect it's search engine ranking?

  • link one
    • link two
      • link three
        • link four
          • link five!

I have a "show more" button that works by showing another list of page links. The user navigates from new to old in this manner. I'm wondering if I replace this with pagination links (1,2,3,4,5) then each link will only be one click away from the top. From an SEO point of view, is this a good idea?

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    Also consider that Google's original premise that the further down a directory tree a page is the less important it is. It is similar to the number of clicks from the home page. For a while many years ago, Google lifted this metric, but then put it back after sites began keyword spamming URI's though I think the weigh(s) are not as dramatic as they once were. But the concept remains. I have not done any testing on this in a long time.
    – closetnoc
    Jan 17, 2015 at 1:52

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When it is harder it is to navigate to a page it will rank worse than a page that is easier to navigate to. Search engines use inbound links to a page to determine how important a page is. Google calls this concept "PageRank". A more generic term for it is "link juice".

Each page passes most of its link juice (say 90%) to the pages to which it links. So if "link one" has 1.000 Juice, and it links to 10 pages including "link two", then "link two" will only have 0.090 Juice. Similarly "think three" will have 0.0081 Juice. It goes down quickly.

Better linking strategies for SEO more closely link all the pages together. For example your first page may be able to link to 10 other pages in the series. The "related" questions links on the right hand side of this page are there in no small part to pass link juice efficiently through this site.

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