--- title: "DOM.RIA's internal linking rebuild and its Googlebot crawl visits" url: https://seomadman.com/studies/internal-linking-crawl-coverage-case section: studies published: 2026-08-27T00:00:00.000Z modified: 2026-08-27T00:00:00.000Z author: Adam Hafez topics: ["Technical SEO"] --- # DOM.RIA's internal linking rebuild and its Googlebot crawl visits ## The short answer JetOctopus's own case study describes real estate marketplace DOM.RIA replacing a footer sitemap with mini-sitemaps linking directory pages, streets, districts and metro stations, to catalog pages Googlebot already crawled heavily. Over matched 15-day windows before and after, Googlebot visits to street pages rose from 525,000 to 1,398,000, district pages from 196,000 to 450,000. ## Key takeaways - JetOctopus's case study describes client DOM.RIA, a Ukrainian real estate marketplace, restructuring internal links to its geography-based directory pages. - The original approach, a footer sitemap of streets and house numbers, drew almost no Googlebot visits, only 16 in a 15-day window. - Moving those links into mini-sitemaps beside heavily-crawled catalog pages changed that, street pages rose from 525,000 to 1,398,000 Googlebot visits across matched 15-day periods. - District pages and metro pages saw comparable jumps, roughly 230% each, over the same before/after windows. - This is JetOctopus's own published account of its client and product, with an obvious incentive to show a favorable result, not an independently audited study. 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. ## Frequently asked questions ### Did crawl coverage really rise from 40% to 70% in this case? No, and we checked directly. That 40-to-70% figure appears on JetOctopus's own internal-linking guide, but as a hypothetical illustration on an unnamed test set, not a claim tied to DOM.RIA or any other named site. We use it nowhere in this article. ### What did DOM.RIA actually change? Per JetOctopus's case study, DOM.RIA had been linking to its geography-based directory pages, streets, districts, metro stations, only from a footer sitemap. It replaced that with mini-sitemaps placing those same links next to catalog pages Googlebot already crawled heavily, then removed the old sitemap. ### Is the click-depth to crawl-frequency figure in wider circulation verified? We could not trace a specific real source for a claim that pages four or more clicks deep see about 70% less crawl frequency. Search results attributing it to log analysis of e-commerce sites did not resolve to any checkable dataset or publication, so we leave that figure out of this piece. ## Sources 1. [Case Study: How DOM.RIA Doubled Their Googlebot Visits Using JetOctopus](https://jetoctopus.com/domria-casestudy/) - JetOctopus (primary)