Is it stil a rule that Google will only index pages up to three tiers deep? Or has this changed?
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I haven't looked into this in a while, it used to be that you didn't want to bury pages beyond three clicks from the main page. What is the rule now in order to have deep pages indexed?
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Great, thanks everybody.
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Google prioritized by the importance content plays on your site (i.e. how prominent it is in your navigation and hierarchy) but given time ... they crawl as much of your site as possible.
So the short answer is no from a crawling standpoint but from a ranking standpoint ... it's a serious consideration. Of course, if you link to all your pages just to push them up then it's a nightmare for visitors and you dilute the PageRank flow for the key pages so it's a balancing act.
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That's still a good rule of thumb. The easier it is to get to, the more likely that Google will index and rank the page.
In Rand's Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization he suggests that a well optimized page should be reachable in no more than 4 clicks from any other page on the site. I would assume that means that a well optimized page should be within 3 clicks of the homepage.
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It's my experience Google indexes everything on your site, over time. Logic is to place most important pages in the upper tiers because googlebot won't get everything at once.
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