Structural Optimization Guide

Structural optimization shortens the path to one page. Select the Structural strategy on a page in your LinkMap visualization and the run walks your own link graph to find the links that would bring that page closer to the homepage and the pages that should be feeding it, then draws them onto the map as planned links.

Page Depth

Your page's depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach it from the homepage. The visualization shows that distance for every page at once as distance from the central node, which is how you spot content sitting further out than you meant to put it. The run treats four clicks or more as too deep, and that is the threshold it works to.

What The Analysis Does

The run saves a snapshot of the site first, labeled as the pre-optimization state, so the before-and-after is on the timeline. It then looks for pages four or more clicks deep and, for each, scores the shallower pages that could cut that depth with a single link, weighting how much depth the link saves against how well the two pages fit topically.

For the target page itself it picks two sets of sources: the five pages with the most PageValue that could pass authority to it, and the five most similar to it by content. It also reads the parent and sibling structure around the target to find the structural relationships it should have and does not.

What You Get Back

The result is drawn on the map and summarized in the same three-part report under Reports. Each link the run chose appears as a planned relationship, a dashed line from the source to the target, and where the analysis finds a content gap it adds a planned page under the right parent with its own structural links. Planned means exactly that: the map holds the plan, and building it on the site is yours to do.

Discard any planned link you disagree with using the relationship management tools. The next crawl records what was actually built, and the content relevance guide covers the topical side of the same links.

Monitoring Progress

The timeline in your LinkMap visualization holds the pre-optimization snapshot beside every crawl since, so the structure before and after is one click apart. Share the timeline with stakeholders to show the change.

Structural optimization addresses the path to the page. When the page also needs authority or topical support, balanced optimization runs all three analyses in one pass.