Site Architecture Tips to Improve Crawlability (and Get Pages Indexed Faster)

Imagine a librarian wheeling in a trolley of new books, only to find the shelves are random, the labels don’t match, and half the aisles end in locked doors. They could still file everything, but it’d take longer, and some books would never make it onto the shelf.

That’s what crawlability feels like for search bots. Crawlability is simply how easily Google (and other search engines) can find, follow, and understand the pages on your site. When your site architecture is tidy, bots reach your best content faster, waste fewer visits on dead ends, and discover fresh pages more reliably.

For content-heavy news sites like CurratedBrief, where categories are wide and updates are constant, small architecture fixes often beat flashy tactics. You don’t need a rebuild, you need clear paths.

Start with a clear site map in your head (then make it real)

Photo by Diva Plavalaguna

Good architecture is planned, not patched. If your structure has grown “organically” for years, it can start to look like a garage where every box is labelled “misc”.

A simple rule of thumb: organise by topics first, then by page type.

• Topics are what readers (and Google) care about: Technology, Finance, Health, Politics.
• Page types are how you present those topics: category pages, hub pages, articles, podcasts, newsletters.

This clarity reduces friction. People find what they want with fewer clicks, and crawlers follow fewer confusing routes. If you want a deeper grounding in why structure affects SEO performance, this overview of website architecture and SEO gives helpful context.

Build topic hubs and silos that match how readers search

Think of topic hubs as the main shelves in that library. Each hub page is a strong, curated overview that points to the best supporting pieces.

A practical hub setup looks like this:

Hub page: “AI in Business”
It links out to a short set of supporting articles, like “AI regulation explained”, “Top AI tools this week”, and “How firms are using AI in fraud checks”.

Each supporting article links back to the hub (so the relationship is obvious) and links to a small handful of close siblings (so crawlers can move sideways without wandering off-topic).

This pattern does two things:

• It helps Google see clear relationships between pages, which supports topical relevance.
• It reduces wasted crawling, because bots keep finding meaningful next steps instead of thin pages.

If you publish explainers alongside breaking news, hubs are also a calm home for fast-changing stories. You can update the hub with new links as events unfold, while older explainers still get found and re-crawled.

Keep the structure shallow, aim for 3 to 4 clicks to reach any page

A site can be a “wide tree” or a “deep maze”. Crawlability improves when your important pages sit closer to the surface.

When pages are buried, three things tend to happen:

• Crawlers reach them less often.
• New pages take longer to be discovered.
• Link value gets diluted across too many steps.

A simple click-depth checklist that works well for news and magazine sites:

Home page: links to key categories (1 click)
Category pages: link to sub-topics and hubs (2 clicks)
Articles: reachable from category or hub listings (3 to 4 clicks)
Avoid: long chains of folders and pagination that hides older posts behind endless “next” pages

You don’t need every page to be shallow. You need your important pages to be.

Make it easy for crawlers to move (navigation and internal links)

Search bots follow links like stepping stones. If the stones are missing, spaced too far apart, or lead into mud, crawling slows down.

Architecture isn’t only your category tree. It’s also how your navigation and internal linking help bots understand:

• what’s important,
• what belongs together,
• what should be visited often.

For a solid crawlability primer, Lumar’s guide on how to improve website crawlability is a good reference point, especially if you’re auditing a large site.

Use menus, breadcrumbs, and related links as signposts

Your menu is the front desk of the library. Keep it calm.

Menu tips that help crawlability:

• Keep labels plain and consistent (for example, “Tech” everywhere, not “Tech” in one place and “Technology” in another).
• Avoid stuffing in too many top-level items. If everything is important, nothing is.
• Make sure category pages are always reachable from your primary navigation.

Breadcrumbs are the little trail of labels that show where a page sits in the hierarchy, for example: Home, Finance, Markets, Article.

They help users orient themselves, and they help crawlers understand parent-child relationships. Adding breadcrumb structured data can be an extra hint, but even plain breadcrumbs help when they’re consistent and crawlable.

Related links are your quiet power move. A “Related” block under an article isn’t just for engagement. It’s also a guided route for bots to find more relevant pages without backing out to a category index.

Fix orphan pages and thin link paths before they waste crawl budget

An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it.

It might still exist in your CMS. It might even be in your sitemap. But if nothing links to it, crawlers often miss it, or treat it like it doesn’t matter.

A practical approach that doesn’t take weeks:

1. Run a site crawl and sort pages by “inlinks = 0”.
2. Decide if each page deserves to exist. If it’s outdated or duplicative, consider merging or redirecting.
3. For pages you keep, add links from:
   • the most relevant hub page,
   • the closest category or sub-category page,
   • one to three closely related articles.

Avoid sitewide footer link stuffing. It can make your site feel spammy, and it doesn’t help users. Links should read like helpful signposts, not a phone book.

If you want a structured checklist for crawl and index problems, this guide on crawlability and indexability steps frames common issues in a clear way.

Clean up your URLs and index signals so bots don’t get lost

Site architecture isn’t only navigation. It’s also the signals you send that say, “These are the pages that matter”.

Messy URL patterns, duplicate paths to the same content, and conflicting index signals can leave crawlers doing extra laps. On big publishing sites, that wasted effort adds up.

Use short, descriptive URL patterns that reflect the hierarchy

Your URLs should read like shelf labels.

Good patterns are short, consistent, and predictable. For example, a Finance category with a Markets sub-topic might use a path like “finance/markets/” before the article slug. A messy pattern looks like a mix of dates, IDs, and random parameters that don’t reflect where the content belongs.

Two practical rules:

• Pick one pattern for categories and one for articles, then stick to it.
• Don’t change URLs often. Every change is a chance to create broken links, redirect chains, and slow discovery.

When you do need to move pages, use 301 redirects and update your internal links so crawlers don’t hit dead ends or bounce through multiple hops.

Align XML sitemaps, canonical tags, and robots rules with your structure

These three work best when they agree with each other.

XML sitemap: a list of pages you want search engines to find.
Canonical tag: a “this is the main version” label when similar pages exist.
Robots rules: guidance on what not to crawl (often low-value spaces like internal search results or endless filter combos).

Keep your sitemaps tidy:

• Don’t include redirected URLs.
• Don’t include blocked URLs.
• Don’t include obvious duplicates.

Then use Google Search Console as your feedback loop. Crawl stats, indexing reports, and error trends will tell you if your architecture changes are helping, or if bots are getting stuck. If you’re planning a larger overhaul, this article on site architecture SEO recommendations is a useful reminder of the common traps.

Conclusion: treat site architecture like road signs, not decoration

Better crawlability comes from a few grounded habits: a shallow structure, topic hubs that show relationships, clear navigation, internal links that prevent orphans, clean URLs, and tidy index signals that don’t contradict each other.

Pick one task to do today: find and fix orphan pages by linking them from the right hub or category.
Pick one task to do this week: audit click depth and pull key pages closer to Home.

When your site becomes easier to walk through, both readers and bots reach the good stuff faster, and your best work stops hiding in the back room.