Keep every page you care about within three clicks of the homepage, stop faceted filter URLs from multiplying into thousands of crawlable variants, and make sure navigation links are plain HTML anchors rather than JavaScript handlers or links trapped inside a Dutchie iframe. Then check the Crawl stats report in Search Console to see where Googlebot really spends its time.
Depth Decides What Gets Crawled
Crawlers reach pages by following links, and every extra click from the homepage lowers a page's priority. The working rule: anything you want ranking sits within three clicks. Run the site through Screaming Frog and open the crawl depth report — it lists exactly how many clicks each URL sits from the start page. On one dispensary site I crawled, the strain category pages sat at depth two but individual strain pages sat at depth six, reachable only through paginated archives. Those deep pages had not been recrawled in weeks. A "Popular strains" link block on the category pages pulled them to depth three, and the recrawls followed.
Faceted Filters Are the Trap
Menu filtering is where cannabis stores manufacture crawl waste at scale. Do the math on a store with 200 products: filter by type, potency range, brand, and price, add four sort orders, and the same 200 products now generate tens of thousands of URL combinations — each one crawlable, each one nearly identical. The fix is layered. Canonical every filtered URL back to its base category. Keep clean, linked category pages for the few filters with real search demand, like edibles or live resin carts. If crawl volume is still out of hand, disallow the filter parameters in robots.txt. What you never do is leave every combination open and linked.
Links Crawlers Can Follow
None of the structure matters if the links themselves are invisible. Two cannabis-specific offenders. First, Dutchie and Jane embeds: the menu's category and product links live inside an iframe on the provider's domain, so from Google's side your site's navigation into the menu simply does not exist. Second, JavaScript menus where "links" are click handlers with no href — Google renders JavaScript inconsistently, and a link that only exists after a click event fires is a link it may never follow. The test is low-tech: view the page source, and if you cannot find an a-tag with an href for a destination, assume crawlers cannot either.
Read the Crawl Stats
Search Console's Crawl stats report, under Settings, shows what Googlebot fetched, how often, and how much of it came back as errors or redirects. If a third of requests are hitting parameter URLs and redirects, you have found your waste. Pair it with a monthly Screaming Frog crawl and watch one number: the share of crawled URLs that are pages you actually want indexed. Navigation changes that move that number up are the ones worth keeping.
Key takeaways
- Pages past three clicks deep get crawled less and rank worse; check depth in Screaming Frog.
- Faceted filters can turn 200 products into tens of thousands of crawlable URLs — canonical them to base categories.
- Dutchie and Jane iframe links live on the provider's domain and do nothing for your crawl.
- Links must be real HTML anchors with hrefs, present in the page source.
- The Crawl stats report in Search Console shows whether Googlebot's time goes to pages that matter.
Frequently asked questions
Does a small dispensary site need to worry about crawl budget?
Mostly no. Google has said crawl budget concerns sites with very large URL counts. A 60-page site gets crawled fine. The advice here still pays off, because the same structure that wastes crawl on big sites confuses ranking signals on small ones.
How many clicks deep is too deep?
Treat three clicks from the homepage as the working limit for pages you want to rank. Screaming Frog's crawl depth report shows where every URL sits. Pages at depth five or six get crawled rarely and rank accordingly.
How do I stop filter URLs from eating the crawl?
Canonical every filtered variant to its base category, and block the filter parameters in robots.txt if crawl volume is a real problem. Give clean category URLs to the handful of filters people actually search, like edibles or live resin.
Why doesn't Google see my menu links?
Usually because the menu is a Dutchie or Jane iframe, so its links exist on the provider's domain, or because the navigation renders only through JavaScript click handlers. Crawlers follow plain HTML anchor tags with href attributes; give them that.
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