Is link depth a problem in a well-siloed internal linking structure?

[pretzelbites]

How much would it hurt the ranking power of a page to have it a few levels deep (say, 5-6 clicks from the homepage rather than 3-4)?

For example, is there really much of a difference between these two?

example.com/category/subcategory/sub-subcateogry/article.html

vs

example.com/category/subcategory/article.html

[bwnbwn]

less traffic. What is your objective from a link?

[martinibuster]

Pages that are important or useful tend to attract links (or are easier to acquire links for) and that's what is generally going to rank, web pages with links to them. How many clicks away from the home page doesn't really matter if it's easy to acquire links to that page.

The silo structure is kind of an outdated concept, dates back to at least 2002, when theming was a big buzzword. The silo strategy also implies a linking strategy focused on the home page with PageRank trickling down and that's also an outdated strategy as well.

But for a UX and UI perspective it makes a lot of sense and is very important. What really matters is what I said above about how well the inner page attracts links.