Study Finds the Structure of Most Blogs May Be Hurting Search Rankings

A recent study on blog structure finds most blogs are making a critical mistake that could impact rankings.

The problem is related to link depth, which is how many clicks it takes to get to a piece of content after landing on the home page.

Perficient Digital finds that two-thirds of blogs have an average link depth greater than five. Content that far away from the home page is not likely to rank unless it has earned a number of links pointing directly to it.

“A stunning two-thirds of the blogs had an average link depth greater than 5 (where link depth is the average number of clicks from the home page of the blog to the content). The problem is, content that many clicks away from the blog’s home page (a link depth of 6 clicks or more) is unlikely to rank for anything unless it has earned external links.”

The study goes on to say that 31.5% of the posts analyzed were 21 clicks or more from their respective home pages.

Further, 9.5% of posts were 50 or more clicks away. There were even some posts that were more than 1,000 clicks away.

So the key takeaway here is, if you find that potentially valuable blog posts are not ranking well, make them easier to access from your website’s home page.

Data from the study is based on 100 randomly selected blogs. Each of the blogs were crawled from top to bottom so their structure could be fully mapped out.

Another interesting insight is that 92% of the posts examined were evergreen in nature as opposed to temporal.

Based on that information, Perficient Digital suggests building a content hub instead of a blog would likely yield better results if content is primarily evergreen.