Architecture questions.
-
I have two architecture related questions.
-
Fewer folders is better. For example, www.site.com/product should rank better than www.site.com/foldera/folderb/product, all else constant. However, to what extreme does it make sense to remove folders? With a small site of 100 or so pages, why not put all files in the main directory? You'd have to manually build the navigation versus tying navigation to folder structure, but would the benefit justify the additional effort on a small site?
-
I see a lot of sites with expansive footer menus on the home page and sometimes on every page. I can see how that would help indexing and user experience by making every page a click or two apart. However, what does that do to the flow of link juice? Does Google degrade the value of internal footer links like they do external footer links? If Google does degrade internal footer links, then having a bunch of footer links would waste link juice by sending a large portion of juice through degraded links, wouldn't it?
Thank you in advance,
-Derek
-
-
Hi James,
It sounds like when you consolidated widgets, you gave Google more of a focused page for persons to search for vs a larger number of pages on the same product. This is interesting as it is the inverse of the long tail effect. You would think that more pages around a given product would be better. I guess this would be a search case where too many pages was a bad thing. Makes me think of how we setup pagination to make sure Google does not focus on p 2,3,4,5 etc but work the noindexes to have focus on page 1 of the pagination.
Thanks for the post!
-
Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?
Thanks!
-
Thanks, I've noticed the site: www issue that you mention, but I'm coming around to the idea that it's a result of other factors, not the length of the url itself.
Do you think Google degrades internal footer links? Here is my concern illustrated in an example:
Image a home page with "40 points" of link juice to pass on. It has 4 links and 2 of them are footer links. Do you think 34 points would transfer to other pages, allowing 15% for normal evaporation as juice is passed, or do you think Google might do something like this:
Body link 1: 8.5 pts
Body Link 2: 8.5 pts
Footer Link 1: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)
Footer Link 2: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)
Total: Only 27 pts passed (and 7pts of juice lost forever)
This is how I'd imagine excessive footer links hurting a site. I have no idea if it works this way in reality. However, most would agree that external links in the footer are not worth as much as body links, so why would that logic not be applied to internal, navigational links?
SEOmoz has extensive footer links on the home page. Anyone from SEOmoz want to explain how SEOmoz evaluated the use of footer links?
-
Regarding footer links... Google more or less knows they are footer links and treats them as such. If it doesn't make much sense to have so many links then don't. There are better ways to drill down to crucial content that is not one click away from home page nav in general (e.g. content!).
URL length does not matter, but it's good to have a nice hierarchy for clarity (much like breadcrumbs) - however I have noticed an interesting thing... when you do site: Google (among other things) sorts site pages by URL length, starting from shorter down to longer URLs. Does this impact rankings? Maybe. How much? Probably to a tiny digree if at all.
-
I think the question is about conversion too. Everyone wants to find the content they are interested in quickly. Smaller more specific categories do that.
Lumpng content into a flatter structure sounds like it's going to be harder to find the page they want. My 2c.
btw, #2, I still dont understand why sites bother with footer links other than the ubiquitous privacy/terms/contact links which are nofollowed anyway..
-
I tend to agree with you. I suspect that urls with fewer folders rank better because of the flow of juice to those pages, not only because of the number of folders. www.site.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/content.html would probably rank fine if it had a direct link from the home page.
-
Hi There!
I do not believe that the folder structure of your site will have any impact on the way the search engines rank your pages. Your site architechture sholud be logical, and built in the same way that you would create an outline (major categories, subcategories, etc.).
In addition, if you start building your site with all of your files in the main directory, as your site grows you will find it increasingly difficult to manage, and will wish that you had built a well thought-out folder structure. Your folder structure should also be a nice way to get each page raked for the product or service that is featured - as the url is a valuable ranking factor.
Regarding link juice and your site footer - you should make a user friendly footer, the kind that you would find helpful as a visitor to your own site. Forget about link juice. In the works of Matt Cutts, "let it flow free", and focus on quality and making your site nice for visitors.
On the other hand, massive numbers of links could be an issue too - so dont forget to use the seoMoz On-Page Report Card optimzation tool which will give you specific suggestions on managing links and page structure for the best SEO results. It was massively valuable for me.
Best Wishes!
-
FYI, this is a B2B lead gen site. I agree having a flat site with everything a click or 2 away is best. My question is a little more specific and revolves around whether these tactics are worth the time and effort
-
I could manually build navigation and have all of my pages in the main directory or maybe 1 folder deep, OR dynamically build navigation based on folder structure and maybe have a site with many of my pages 2 or 3 folders deep. Any benefit to the former, because the latter is definitely easier.
-
Are extensive footer links generally a net benefit? Looks like SEOmoz uses them.
-
-
Obviously the less clicks to your money pages, the better. Assuming an ecommerce site, can you reach all your product pages with 3 clicks? That's always my goal. I have sub-categories only when needed, and in fact just went through a re-write where I replaced some sub-categories with "richer" product pages that asked more questions. In simple terms I replaced /blue-widgets, /red-widgets, /green-widgets with /widgets that asked the customer what color they wanted.
The result was my conversion rate almost doubled - and traffic has increased so google liked something
I would remove footer links - just worthless noise at best, or viewed as spammy at worst..
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
-
10 quick questions for SEO experts!
Hey guys! I'm working to build something to make technical SEO audit less painful and I'd like to hear from other SEO experts. Can I ask you to answer this quick survey: https://mykoto.typeform.com/to/R5Gvyr THANKS!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jbrisebois0 -
Metatags on drupal question
Hi Im quite inexperienced on drupal (normally an umbraco user!) and im having some difficulty with the Metatags on the CMS. I have been applying Meta Title and descriptions to the individual pages however they only appear when i preview the page and not when the page is saved. When i go into the metatag section located at /admin/config/search/metatags i am given a list of settings including Global: Front Page and Node. Im sure the reason it keeps defaulting the metatags back is to do with this but im not sure what to change to apply my own Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheZenAgency1 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
Can SPA (single page architecture) websites be SEO friendly?
What is the latest consensus on SPA web design architecture and SEO friendliness?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robo342
By SPA, I mean rather than each page having its own unique URL, instead each page would have an anchor added to a single URL. For example: Before SPA: website.com/home/green.html After SPA: website.com/home.html#green (rendering a new page using AJAX) It would seem that Google may have trouble differentiating pages with unique anchors vs unique URLs, but have they adapted to this style of architecture yet? Are there any best practices around this? Some developers are moving to SPA as the state of the art in architecture (e.g., see this thread: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Google-crawling-websites-built-using-121615.S.219120193), and yet there may be a conflict between SPA and SEO. Any thoughts or black and white answers? Thanks.0 -
Quick Rel Canonical Link Juice Question
Let's say I have two duplicate pages, A and B. However, A has 5 external links and B has 3 _different _external links. If I add the rel canonical tag to B, so that A is the "master page" do I also lose whatever link juice was going to B from the 3 external links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Few questions regarding wordpress and indexing/no follow.
I'm using Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin on my wordpress site which allows you to quickly set up nofollow / no index on specific taxonomies. I wanted to see what you guys thought was the best practice in setting up my various taxonomies. Would you noidex, but follow all of these, none of these, or just some of these: Categories, tags, media, author archives ( (My blog is mainly a single author blog (me) but my wife does sometimes write posts. So I didn't know how this effected everything. Also I could simply make the blog a single user blog and just have her posts be guest posts, but I'd rather leave her as a user.), and date archives. The example I read on line only no-index's the date archives. Just curious what you guys thought. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Affiliate Site Duplicate Content Question
Hi Guys I have been un-able to find a definite answer to this on various forums, your views on this will be very valuable. I am doing a few Amazon affiliate sites and will be pulling in product data from Amazon via a Wordpress plugin. The plugin pulls in titles, descriptions, images, prices etc, however this presents a duplicate content issue and hence I can not publish the product pages with amazon descriptions. Due to the large number of products, it is not feasible to re-write all descriptions, but I plan re-write descriptions and titles for 50% of the products and publish then with “index, follow” attribute. However, for the other 50%, what would be the best way to handle them? Should I publish them as “noindex,follow”? **- Or is there another solution? Many thanks for your time.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0 -
Controlling PageRank vs flat site architecture
Hey all. Here's the scenario. I have this pretty trusted site with a relatively high PR. The navigation menu has around 300 links. But this is because it is a CSS menu that drills down into subcategories. Now, would restricting the amount of links in this menu be beneficial? I am not worried about any subcategory pages not being crawled or indexed, but I am concerned that subcategory pages will not receive as high of PageRank if they are not linked to directly from the home page, thereby lowering the ranking potential. Even with new pages that are created they receive a PR of 5 if linked to from the home page. But I'm also thinking that toning down the menu size would be beneficial by funneling more PageRank to category pages and increasing the likelihood of ranking for some core head/middle terms. I have seen sites that externalize the menu in JavaScript files and disallow it in Robots.txt to prevent too much PageRank from linking out, but SEO isn't really a one-solution-fits-all in my experience. I may try a test. Externalizing the menu may also increase the relevance for pages because I won't have a bunch of other content on the page not relevant to that page's specific keywords. Anyone with experience in this arena? I would love to hear your input. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeremyNelson580