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The right click distance can improve your search
engine rankings
If you read this newsletter regularly, you will know that
there are many factors that can influence the ranking of
a web page on search engines. A factor that is overlooked
by many webmasters is the click distance.
What is click distance?
Click distance is the number of clicks it takes to get
to a web page from the home page of your web site. If you
need 5 clicks from your home page to go to page A and 2
clicks from you home page to get to page B then page B
has a smaller click distance than page A.
Why is click distance important?
Some search engines (including Google) seem to take click
distance into account when calculating the ranking of web
pages. The lower the click distance, the more value is
given to a web page.
In addition to the click distance, some search engines
might also take the directory structure into account.
A web page with the URL www.example.com/page.htm is
considered more important than a page with a URL that points
to a sub directory: www.example.com/here/there/whereever/page.htm
How can you influence the click distance on your
web site?
It's likely that a clean site with less click distance
gets better Google rankings than a site with a cluttered
navigation.
An easy way to make every page of your web site available
with at most two clicks is putting a sitemap link
on every web page. Using Google's Sitemaps service doesn't
help because it does not change the click distance of your
web site. You have to put a normal sitemap on your web
site.
If you use a normal sitemap on your web site then you
don't have to participate in Google's Sitemaps program
because Google will find all of your pages through your
regular sitemap.
Are there official documents about click distance?
A MSN Search patent application with the title System
and method for ranking search results using click distance contains
further information about click distance and its possible
effects on web page rankings.
Click distance is another factor that shows how important
it is that search engines can find and parse your web pages
quickly and easily. To make it as easy as possible for search
engines to parse your pages, use our proven top 10 optimization
tools for web
pages and links.
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