Help needed for a 53 Page Internal Website Structure & Internal Linking
-
Hey all...
I'm designing the structure for a website that has 53 pages. Can you take a look at the attached diagram and see if the website structure is ok?
On the attached diagram I have numbered the pages from 1 to 53, with 1 being the most important home page - 2,3,4,5, being the next 4 important pages - 6,7,8... 15,16,17 being the 3rd set of important pages, and 18,19,20..... 51,52,53 being the last set of pages which are the easiest to rank.
I have two questions:
- Is the website structure for this correct? I have made sure that all pages on the website are reachable.
- Considering the home page, and page number 2,3,4,5 are the most important pages - I am linking out to these pages from the the last set of pages (18,29,20...51,52,53). There are 36 pages in the last set - and out of this 36, from 24 of them I am linking back to home page and page number 2,3,4,5. The remaining 8 pages of the 36 will link back to pages 6,7,8...15,16,17.
In total the most importnat page will have the following number of internal incoming links:
Home Page : 25
Pages 2,3,4,5 : 25
Pages 6,7,8...15,16,17 : 4
Pages 18,19,20...51,52,53 : 1
Is this ok considering home page, and pages 2,3,4,5 are the most important? Or do you think I should divide and give more internal links to the other pages also?
If you can share any inputs or suggestions to how I can improve this it will greatly help me. Also if you know any references for good guides to internal linking of websites greater that 50 pages please share them in the answers.
Thank you all!
Regards,
P.S - The URL for the image is at http://imgur.com/XqaK4
-
Flat site architecture shows that any directory one step from the root shows extreme importance; so essentially you can link to any inner page in any other directories.
For example: USA
Jacksonville Atlanta Mississippi New York Los Angeles Ohio Las Vegas
As you can see in this model, this is natural. But it shows the flat site architecture I was referring to. Any of the cities show great value to the home page. You want to include any unique data in these directories. Essentially any file can be made important, so you don't have to worry about specific keywords you want to rank for not have an equal opportunity. You don't have to worry about one folder on your server having more importance over another.
You can Google "flat architecture"
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/a-flat-architecture-in-practice
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture
You can certainly should focus on your content algorithm and start planning your linking building profile.
-
Thanks Chad... Good tip regarding passing up link juice by creating valuable stuff in the deep pages. Shall follow that.. You've answered my question, but I have one more doubt regarding natural inner pages. Is it better to have a natural flow .. As in. Home page - country specific pages - city specific pages - shops in the cities Or Home page - important country & city pages & shops - less important country & city pages - shops. If I use the first option, which is more natural I can clearly show the path to each page. If I use the second option, it's not natural- but the important pages are closer to the home page. Another option is to have the natural flow but to also link out to important pages where appropriate from top level pages. I know this is a little vague, but I hope you've got my doubt.., would love to hear your thoughts on this .. Thanks.
-
I took a look at your screenshot; but a few things first.
Proper silo-site is an ongoing process. The most important thing is to ensure that you have natural inner pages and link them to each top-level-directory (one directory away from the root). You can certainly tie your pages in each inner directory by linking from the main inner directory.
As you syndicate your unique pages in unique directories (again one directory from the root) you can pass great link juice throughout your website's skeleton, leading to better home page rank.
Whitehat SEO includes a very deep inter-linking structure. To get a feel for this checkout Wikipedia. They are the best at placing links to relevant or similar content above the fold and naturally linked to other directories within their framework.
To answers your question direct:
Inner link as much as you can to other files and from top-level-directories to files within it's directory. Only when it is natural include an anchor to other files for further reading.
The deeper a page can link to a higher level directory the better.
*For off-site SEO, getting links to the deep pages is going to be key to help pass up the link juice. Try sampling your content on different websites and getting a link back to page in the process. You can create pdf, info-graphics, or technical content with these deep pages and it will do wonders for your website.
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
-
Sale Pages On An eCommerce Website
I have a client who sells 50 brands of shoes. At the moment the developer has a noindex/nofollow tag on all sale pages which is wrong as around 10% of site activity revolves around those pages. The structure looks like this: 1. For Cats/Sub Cats site/sale
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nigel_Carr
site/womens/sale
site/womens/shoe/sale
site/womens/shoes/ballerinas/sale For every cat/subcat - there are 10 cats and average 5 subcats per cat so 50 pages of sale. 2. For Brands site/brand
site/brand/womens
site/sale/brand
site/sale/womens/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/subcat/brand So each brand can have four sale pages on top of its own brand page. 50 brands x 54 = around 2700. Now no one is going to start writing 2700 pieces of additional on page content (although Meta is OK! ) and we risk further diluting the brand pages we need to show highly for, so we need to do something. Should we Category Pages: 1. Allow all sale cat and subcat pages to proliferate through Google? or
2. Canonicalise all sale sub category pages back to category
3. Caonicalise all category and Subcategory pages back to sale/womens Brand Pages: 1. Allow all sale brand pages to proliferate through Google ?
2. Canonicalise Sub Cat brand pages back to sale/category/brand
3. Canonicalise Sub Cat and Cat back to sale/brand Note the lower pages never do well in search. If you search a brand + Sale in Google it is always the site/brand page that comes up, never the sale version (This is from research on other similar sites and my own analysis) Same with Sub Cats - eg, Brand + Subcat - it's always site/brand that comes up first wand has the highest PA. Also we can't analyse any of these sale pages in MOZ or anywhere else as they are not in search at all having been no indexed. That's my conundrum for today, Any thoughts would be appreciated!0 -
Please Help me! I need advice for my website
I have 2 Domains with the same name vps nine and vpsn ine with same content. How to solve that problem? Do I need to change the content from my main website. My Hosting is having different plans, but with the same features. So many pages were having the same content, and it is not possible to change the content, what is the solution for that? Please let me know how to solve that issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
Does adding more outgoing links on a high PA page decrease the juice passed to previous links?
Hi, I'm not sure how PA DA exactly works when the goal is to create backlinks to your site in order to have the most impact on passing PA DA juice (if there is such a thing) to ones money site. For example let's say you have a blog and the PA is 40 DA is 30. Let's say I create a backlink pointing to my site on the homepage of this blog, in which I desire better rankings for, and the links I created are only 1-3 outgoing links on this post which is again on the homepage. Then say in a months time, I want to add another post on the homepage (so the 40 PA and 30 DA stays the same) creating a backlink to one of my other money sites. Does adding this second round of backlinks result in sending less juice to the first? This is what I want to know. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | z8YX9F800 -
Multiple Internal links to same destinations
My company is redoing our homepage and there will be 4 links to our main play pages (5 games). 2 in the menu and 2 within the content. I was thinking I should no follow one of the links on the homepage + 1 in the menu so that we don't have link dilution from having multiple internal links to the same destination within 1 page. Does this make sense? Any downside of this or suggestions of a solution that may be more effective? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
100 + links on a scrolling page
Can you add more than 100 links on your webpage If you have a webpage that adds more content from a database as a visitor scrolls down the page. If you look at the page source the 100 + links do not show up, only the first 20 links. As you scroll down it adds more content and links to the bottom of the page so its a continuos flowing page if you keep scrolling down. Just wanted to know how the 100 links maximum fits into this scenario ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Need help or explanation on my site!
My site has suffered greatly since the recent Google update. I have done everything as suggested. I have had all bad links removed over 2 months ago. I have lowered keyword density (not easy since the keyword is in our company name!). I have rewritten various content and bolstered our existing content. What gives? What can I do? As an example the keyword, "maysville plumber" - I rank about 40th for this keyword. The first three pages are filled with websites with literally NO content or no added value. Maysville is a town of about 1k residents - there is no competition. Before the update I was #1 for years on this particular keyword. And this is the case with 35 other cities (mostly small cities, but a few larger ones). Please help me understand or suggest what I can possibly do at this point. We have hundreds of pages of unique content on each and every page. We have zero duplicate content (I have ran tests and crawlers). We have no fishy links. I have not gotten any messages from google on Webmasters. PLEASE HELP!! I asked a similar question a little while back and fixed all of the suggestions. My site is www.akinsplumbing.net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0 -
Not sure why Home page is outranked by less optimized internal pages.
We launched our website just three weeks ago, and one of our primary keyword phrases is "e-business consultants". Here's what I don't get. Our home page is the page most optimized around this search phrase. Using SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool, the home page scores an "A". And yet it doesn't rank in the top 50 on Google Canada, although two other INTERNAL pages - www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-team/ & /www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-approach/ - rank 5 & 6 on Google Canada, even though they only score a grade "C" for on-page optimization for this keyword phrase. I've always understood that the home page is the most powerful page. Why are these others outranking it? I checked the crawl and Google Webmaster, and there is no obvious problem on the home page. Is this because the site is so new? It goes against all previous experience I've had in similar situation. Any guidance/ insight would be highly appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
Link Juice - Lots of Pages
I have a site, PricesPrices.com where I'm steadily building inbound links and pagerank. I have about 4600 pages on the site, most of which are baby products in the baby gear sector. There are many outdated items that aren't really my focus, but do pop up in long-tail search queries from time to time. My question is a pretty basic one. Theoretically if a site has say 28/100 link juice, then as you go deeper and deeper into the site, the link juice is divided more and more. My question: Is this really true or just a concept? My thoughts are to hide many of the products that i don't really need to focus on therefor passing more link juice to the products that remain, but I also don't want to that if it won't necessarily make the remaining pages rank higher or have more link juice. I also have to keep in mind the merchandising aspect of the site and providing a good user experience. If i only have 300 products on the site, there will be a ton of unhappy people who can't find the products they are looking for. Any thoughts and/or pointers in the direction of funneling that pagerank down into my site would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modparent0