DOM.RIA's internal linking rebuild and its Googlebot crawl visits

Internal linking is one of the few crawl-budget levers a site controls without waiting on Google, and JetOctopus, a log-file and crawl analysis vendor, published a case study describing exactly that lever in use on a client site. We read the case study directly rather than relying on how it circulates in secondary write-ups, several of which, we found while researching this piece, attach a different, more dramatic figure to it that the source itself does not support.

What DOM.RIA changed#

JetOctopus’s client DOM.RIA is a Ukrainian real estate marketplace with thousands of new listings added daily. Its directory pages, organized by street, district and metro station, are geography-dependent pages a real estate site depends on, but they sat behind a footer sitemap that Googlebot largely ignored: per the case study, the sitemap pages drew only 16 visits in a 15-day window. The team’s fix was not to add more links in general, it was to move the existing links to a better position: mini-sitemaps for each city directory, placed next to the catalog pages Googlebot was already crawling heavily, replacing the old footer sitemap entirely.

What the log data showed afterward#

Comparing matched 15-day periods before and after the change, JetOctopus reports Googlebot visits to street pages rising from 525,000 to 1,398,000, an increase of roughly 266%. District pages rose from 196,000 to 450,000 and metro pages from 10,000 to 23,000, both roughly 230% increases. These are crawl visit counts pulled from server log analysis, not an indexation or ranking outcome, and the case study does not report what happened to organic traffic or rankings for these page types afterward.

Why this is one vendor’s own case, not an independent audit#

JetOctopus sells the crawl-analysis tool used to produce these numbers, and the case study is JetOctopus marketing its own client work, not a third-party audit of DOM.RIA’s logs. We also checked a widely repeated claim, that a JetOctopus case study showed crawl coverage rising from 40% to 70% after internal linking changes. Fetching JetOctopus’s own internal-linking guide directly, that figure turns out to describe a hypothetical test set used to illustrate how to measure impact, not a real, named case. Several third-party SEO blogs cite it as if it were DOM.RIA’s or another client’s result; it is not, and we have left it out of this piece. We separately tried to verify a claim that pages four or more clicks deep see about 70% less crawl frequency than pages within two clicks, and could not trace it to any checkable dataset, so that figure does not appear here either.

Why we care#

The mechanism DOM.RIA’s case describes, moving links from a rarely-crawled location to sit beside pages Google already visits often, is a concrete, repeatable technique independent of this vendor’s numbers. The honest caveat is that this is one company’s account of its own client and its own tool, published to sell that tool, and the outcome measured is crawl visits, not indexation or rankings. Treat the direction as a real, log-verified signal worth testing on your own site, and treat the magnitude, 230 to 266%, as specific to one real estate marketplace’s link graph, not a number to promise a client.