REDUCING CLICK DEPTH AND BOOSTiNG TRAFFIC FOR PDPs

Internal linking isn't sexy, but it is one of the most powerful levers in technical SEO, particularly for websites with large numbers of products. In the travel sector, this is especially true for hotel-led sites, where thousands of individual property pages often sit beneath layers of destination and category URLs. Just think of a destination like Spain where you may have several layers of architecture befote you even get to the hotels e.g.

Spain > Canary Islands > Tenerife > Playa de las Américas

While this structure may make sense from a user or commercial perspective, it can create significant challenges for search engines.

And this is exactly why I recommended an HTML Sitemap for Travel Republic listing all the hotels in a way that was easy for Search Engines and users (but mainly Search Engines, let's not kid ourselves) to crawl.

(Unfortunately, I can't show you the old internal linking structure of the hotel pages because the 'directory' pages have all been 410'ed and they aren't in the Wayback Machine, but it was far from optimal).

The sitemap (https://www.travelrepublic.co.uk/hotels-directory) was linked to on the homepage to ensure it was accessible at the minimum possible depth

With over 17,000 Hotels in total, it was impossible to list them ALL on one page, so each page housed 200 hotels, meaning a total of 91 pages.

Every page was also listed on every other page, meaning that the depth of all pages were the same, and no individual hotel had a click depth of more than 4 (previously the max depth was around 18)

Below you can see that the AVERAGE depth of the hotel URLs (all containing '/2-') was 5.58, after implementing an HTML sitemap for hotels

After the HTML Sitemap was implemented this average depth improved to 3.46, an improvement (or decrease) of 36%

Of course, this would have mainly benefited hotels that started off deeper in the structure, which would have predominantly been less popular hotels with less search volume.

Despite this, the potential for improvement is still huge, even if only half the hotels saw an improvement in depth, and generated one additional click per week each, that's an extra 8,500 clicks per week.

Of course, these are all hypothetical, but the point is there is value in driving tiny improvements for large numbers of pages through scalable changes to site architecture.

The HTML Sitemap was implemented in mid-October, and by mid-December, traffic began to exceed the previous year's levels (at the time of writing, hotel traffic was around 10% YoY for the last 7 days)

Of course, the December 2025 Core Update launched around this time so we can't attribute the gains directly to HTML Sitemap, but the likelihood is that it helped.

The lesson here is, when you have thousands of 'product' pages (in this case hotels), you need internal linking solutions that can be scaled up rapidly. Manually implementing individual 'in-content' links to all of these hotels simply isn't sustainable (although an automated version of this wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility).