The Seduction of the Shallow Net: An Argument for Deep, Difficult Links

There is a pervasive gospel in our discipline of website architecture, preached from countless SEO podcasts and ‘best practice’ guides: flatten the site structure. The mantra goes that every page should be just a click or two from the homepage. We are told to create a "shallow net," casting it wide to ensure that users, and more importantly, crawlers, can effortlessly skim the surface of our content, finding everything with minimal effort. This sounds like a user-centric, logical goal. But what if this obsession with accessibility is, in fact, making our sites flimsy and our content disposable?

The promise of the shallow net is one of efficiency. It champions a kind of frictionless discovery, where a visitor arrives and is immediately presented with a neatly organized menu of options, leading directly to all the important corners of the domain. But this model has an unintended consequence: it flattens not just the path, but the perceived value of the destination. When everything is equally and instantly accessible, the implicit hierarchy of ideas, the narrative of a subject that unfolds with depth and context, begins to evaporate. The journey itself—the act of moving from a broad concept down through layers of specificity—is a core part of understanding. We sacrifice this pedagogical structure at the altar of immediate gratification.

Furthermore, the shallow net is a boon for the impatient visitor, but a curse for the genuinely curious. It fails the user who wants to dive deep, who is not just looking for a quick answer but for a comprehensive exploration. A deep site structure, one that requires three, four, or even five clicks to reach a terminal page, is not inherently flawed. It is, rather, an ecosystem. It creates a logical sequence, a sense of place and context. A user who clicks from ‘Philosophy’ to ‘Epistemology’ to ‘Coherentist Theories’ is on a deliberate path of inquiry. The depth of the URL, often maligned as ‘crawler-unfriendly,’ is in fact a map of a coherent intellectual territory. It signals that the content at the end of that path is specialized, detailed, and built upon the foundational layers above it.

Re-evaluating the Internal Link

Our internal linking strategies have been co-opted by this flattening ideology. We are told to link promiscuously, to weave a tight, shallow mesh where every page points to every other ‘related’ page. But this creates a muddle. When a link can lead anywhere, it leads nowhere in particular. A deep structure allows for a more meaningful kind of internal linking: contextual guidance. Instead of a block of ‘related posts’ that function like a slot machine of content, a link placed deep within a paragraph can act as a footnote, a “if you have grasped this concept, the next logical step is here.” It is a guide through the depths, not a frantic attempt to keep the visitor bouncing around on the surface.

This is not an argument for deliberate obscurity or bad navigation. It is an argument for intentional depth. A well-designed deep site still has a clear navigation system and sound information architecture; it simply rejects the notion that the fastest path is always the best one. It trusts that users are capable of, and often crave, a journey. It understands that value is often built through effort, even the minimal effort of a few extra clicks. Perhaps it’s time we stopped trying to build gleaming, superficial aquariums where every fish is on display at once, and started crafting richer, more mysterious forests, where the most rewarding discoveries are found not at the path’s head, but along its winding, deepening course.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: