Do a lot of related articles in lower subfolders, boost higher level subfolder keywords?

[PrizeWize]

For instance www.example1.com/cooltopic/ has 5 ‘verycool articles’ under /cooltopic/

www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article1/ , www.example1.com/cooltopic/verycool-article2/.

On www.example2.com/cooltopic/ there are 100 ‘verycool articles’

Who will rank above the other for the term ‘cooltopic’ in the SERPS? Is it www.example1.com with 5 ‘verycool articles’ or www.example2.com with 100 ‘verycool articles’. Or does the quantity of (theme related) articles in subfolders not matter?

And what if example1.com has more quality external links from the ‘awesome community’. Would this change a lot in the rankings?

Or what if both domains have 0 external links, but example2.com has 95 more internal links (from the articles) to /cooltopic/ than example1.com with only 5 articles.

[PrizeWize]

Thanks again for your input,

The reason this question arrose was because i was thinking of a news structure from a users perspective and my collgeague from a technical standpoint. Also he showed me how a friend of his got to the first page in the serps simply by moving a lot of related content under a subfolder.

This i found hard to believe, that simply putting in content under a subfolder would make the higher subfolder automatically rank higher.

Up to 5 years ago i thought sites rank well because they write a lot of articles, then i in 2007 i started reading up and focussing on SEO and understood that its not about quantity but quality and hierarchy and that really got me interested in SEO.

So i thought a 'traditional' news category like www.example.com/news/ with related articles (inter)linking to related subfolder landing pages would be a logical experience for the user and thus for bots. But 'sparring' with my colleague who is imo a very good programmer, made me second guess myself and the situation, and thus i ended up asking the great seomoz community :).

So thanks again for the input and will probably have the articles both under www.example.com/news/topic-article1/ and under www.example.com/topic/news/opic-article1/ (with a canonical tag on it).

Also i have never thought about the concequences for CTR in the SERPS using the dates in the url's. Thats a very valid point and wil have to take a look at how 'evergreen' the written news articles are.  Comming to think of it I also unconsciously ávoid' sites with urls showing old dates when searching for something specific. I even goes as fas as changing the date range in search settings.

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[matbennett]

I htink that /related-topic/news can work, but it does depend on the topic and what people are looking for and expecting.

If they got to /related-topic/news will they miss out on stuff that they are likely to want to see under /other-topic/news ? Will people be looking for /news/ which this structure probably wouldn't support that well?  Users first  - bot second.

One other tip: If you are thinking of adding date in to the URL have a think about how evergreen your content is likely to be.  If it is all really topical then date in url can work well: People search, can see it is recent and your CTR will go up.

However if you are using the same content area for longer term content then it can have the opposite effect. Someone searches a year later, seest the old date and assumes that it is our dated even if it isn't.

[PrizeWize]

Hi Mat Bennett,

First of thanks a lot for thinking about my predicament and giving a well-structured reply.

The reason why i asked the question had to do with the placing of news articles on our website.

Initially i would say news articles should go under www.example.com/news/article-title/ or similar www.example.com/news/2012/october/article-title/

But my colleague has placed news under a theme related section like this www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ with the idea that this would boost www.example.com/related-topic/ for the keyword ‘related-topic’.

His thinking is that google looks at the url like this -> www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ then checks out www.example.com/related-topic/news/ and then google crawls www.example.com/related-topic/.

So by placing a lot of theme related news articles in a subfolder google would crawl www.example.com/related-topic/ more often. His point being the url is optimized for google and menu structure and links onsite are optimized for the users experience. After reading your reply and some more discussion, we will probably end up doing the following -> Create a news system then place the news under www.example.com/news/article-title or www.example.com/news/2012/october/article-title.  And also place the news articles under the related main categories like so www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/.

And to avoid duplicate content issues www.example.com/news/article-title would be canonically linked to www.example.com/related-topic/news/related-article-title/ (this being the ‘original’).

This way we should cater to both the user and search engine.

What do u think of such a setup?

P.S. movie tip. I watched ‘Indie Game - the movie’ last night and it was very inspirational.

[matbennett]

I think I follow.

Looking at it in a vacuum I would say that example2 has a tiny advantage. The net link equity of what is pointing back to the category page is the same in both cases, but there is greater emphasis from the internal anchor text.  In practical terms this will be very small though.

In a real situation there are so many larger issues at play that you'd struggle to measure this. the effects in incoming links, overall domain authority, on page optimisation etc etc etc are going to far out weigh this.

Reading between the lines...

I am guessing that you are really asking "should I structure my site like this, or like that?".  If that is the question then do what makes for the most usable site. Do though factor in whether more category pages could be useful in their own right as landing pages as well.

Picking the most usable site means a site that people are more likely to enjoy using. That means that they stay longer, hopefully make you some money whilst they are there, mention it to friends, tweet it, share it, link to it etc. Those things can bring real,measurable benefits

I hope that is useful.