What depth will the SE's crawl to ?

[PhilC]

My client has a concern with the way I have organised the structure of their website to create an efficient inlinking strategy.

The website has a depth of 3 levels.
At the first level, I have 5 pages. From these 5 pages, I have links to pages of the second level. Some of the second level pages are linked to more pages at the third level.

The client is concerned that search engines do not index more than one or two level deep in a website. Is this true? How can I convince her otherwise? (Perhaps you could point me to some articles.)

[sem4u]

Don't worry about it. Build a site map and link to it from the navigation on each page.

[PhilC]

Oh I have built a Site Map too ... (Horrors if I forgot that !)

[wbstein]

Any good examples of a site map out there?
Any right, or wrong way of doing it?

[hatchet]

I like this one
http://www.macromedia.com/sitemap/

[PhilC]

I know sitemaps are definitely a plus ... But I sure would Like some info on how much depth of a website will a search engine index ... ?

[awall19]

search engines are not concerned with levels deep

../../../../

they are concerned with links deep. i can link to something 10 levels deep from my home page and it will get indexed within days.

as far as how many links they will follow that is a function of the followability of your links and the overall link popularity of your site. the more popular your site (more inbound links) the more inclined they will be to crawl deeply. amazon has like over a million pages indexed

[PhilC]

Ah ... that was helpful. Thanks man.

[awall19]

no prob

[Johan007]

I find that if you link to the latest articles from the homepage then it is likely to get indexed quicker.

[sem4u]

All good points here. Keep the site map to a maximum of 100 links.