Internal Site Structure Question (URL Formation and Internal Link Design)
-
Hi,
I have an e-commerce website that has an articles section:
There is an articles.aspx file that can be reached from the top menu and it holds links to all of the articles as follows:
xxx.com/articles/article1.aspx
xxx.com/articles/article2.aspxI want to add several new articles under a new sections, for example a complete set of articles under the title of "buying guide" and the question is what would be the best way?
I was thinking of adding a "computers-buying-guides.aspx" accessible from the top menu / footer and from it linking to:
xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/what-to-check-prior-to-buying-a-laptop.aspx
xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/weight-vs-performance.aspx
etc.Any thoughts / recommendations?
Thanks
-
With an eCommerce site I would always recommend having as flat of a site architecture as possible. This make's it easy for the spiders to crawl and the users to find the content without having to dig or land through a SERP. If you are adding new content to your article section that you want to be unrelated to the existing content in the current sub-folder being used, then creating a directory to house the new content with a more descriptive sub-folder name is the best idea in my opinion. I would make sure to have the link in the header OR the footer but not both. Just design it for whatever makes sense from the user's end and you will be in good shape.
I would also recommend that you label the pages with the Google recommendation tags (rel=next, rel=prev, and the not-so-trusty rel="canonical") and identify those pages you don't want indexed with Bing URL Normalization.
-
Ok, on your current articles page, make sure you don't exceed 100 links on that page including all other site navigation.If you do, create a second articles page and start listing articles on that page to balance the load out for the regular articles section. If your getting likes and good feedback i would change that. If you ever had to, simply 301 redirect so you pass all the link juice to new page.
I think I would then create a new top level link under articles called buying guide and have that link to a buying-guide articles page where you can layout your buying guide articles in like fashion to your original articles landing page.
Hope that makes sense. I can see it in my mind but sometimes that's hard to put in type.
-
What I currently have is like your second suggestion, main page with many articles sections. However I have too many articles on it.
Besides, I believe that the guides section will be very good and is worth standing on its own.
The reason I'm not changing the structure of the existing articles is simply because the articles there already have many social signals (likes etc.) which I don't want to lose when I change the URL.
-
If your planning on adding several different article directories why not have a main articles link from main navigation, then have droop down menus for sub directory articles? So it would look something like this:
/articles/
/articles/buying-guide/
/articles/software/
/articles/hardware/
etc, etc, etc.
Or you could have your main articles landing page list all links under various sub categories with H tag titles separating the directories.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to identify number of internal links to page?
Hi Guys, Besides OSE & screaming frog - are there any tools which can check internal links to a page? I know ahrefs, majestic cannot. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Page must be internally linked to get indexed?
If a there is page like website.com/page; I think this page will be indexed by Google even we don't link it internally from anywhere. Is this true? Will it makes any difference in-terms of "indexability" if we list this page on sitemap? I know page's visibility will increase when link from multiple internal pages. I wonder will there be any noticeable difference while this page is listed in sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
URL Structure
URL i have to use targeted keyword on all sub page domain or not for example now i am using url like this format fundingtype.html litigation-funding.html legal-funding.html financingservices.html process.html and if i re-write all url with targated keyword like this format lawsuit-loans-fundingtype.html lawsuit-loans-litigation-funding.html lawsuit-loans-legal-funding.html lawsuit-loans-financingservices.html lawsuit-loans-process.html so which type URL are more effective for best SEO ??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JulieWhite0 -
To follow or nofollow paid internal links?
I am having an internal debate on the need to use nofollow tags on sponsored internal links that link to internal pages. One thought is based on this Matt Cutts video (Should internal links use rel="nofollow"?) in which he says that there is never a need to use a nofollow tag on an internal link. The other school of thought is that paid links with follow tags are a violation of Google policy and it does not matter if they link internally or externally. Matt was just not thinking of this scenario in his short video. Would love to hear if anyone has had any manual action from Google based on their internal links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
How should I react to my site being "attacked" by bad links?
Hello, We have never bought links or done manipulative linbuilding. Meanwhile, someone has recently (15th of March) pointed at the top 5 websites on my main keyword with lots of bad quality links. So far it has not affected my rankings at all. Actually, I think it will not affect them because I think it was not a massive enough attack. The particular page that has been attacked had about 100 root domains pointing it and now it went up to something like 400. All those were in one day. All of those links use the same anchor text: the keyword we're ranking for. With those extra 300 root domains pointing at us, we went from 600 rootdomain to 900 pointing at our domain as a whole. The page that was targetted by the attack is not the homepage. What I wanted to do was to basically do nothing since I think it won't affect our rankings in any ways but I wanted you guys' opinion. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Canonical url question
i just search seomoz tooll it say duplicate content for www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.php should i use canonical url for this ? is yes then is this right ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Internal structure update
How often does google update the internal linking structure of a website ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Site structure from an SEO standpoint
I am fortunate enough to be working with a client who is still building their website. From a site structure standpoint, what can I look for with my SEO hat as they build their wire frames and storyboard their site? I want to make sure I don't miss any components that might be helpful short and long term
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0