Google & Site Architecture
-
Hi
I've been reading the following article about Google's quality signals here:
They mention - 3) All your categories should be accessible from the main menu. All your web pages should be labelled with the relevant categories.
Is this every category? We have some say 3 levels deep, and they aren't all in the menu. I'd like them to be, so would be good to make a case for it.
Thank you
-
Hi
Oh not to worry, there's no rush
It's a development issue, but they are currently reviewing this and we have requested lower levels in the menu structure.
-
Let me do a quick audit of this I will get back to you right away sorry about the long wait. When you talking about the inability to change navigation (level 3) Can I ask is it because you do not have Development or rights or is it a CMS issue?
Tom
-
Becky I am so sorry for the long delay I will reply to you tomorrow by this time
Tom
-
Thank you very much for your replies & advice
Here is an example of our site structure, our URL structure is very simple, nothing sits within a folder.
So if I want to rank this page - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/personal-protection-equipment-lockers
The structure at present is:
Home > Cupboards & Lockers > (linked from main nav) > Lockers (linked from main nav) > PPE Lockers - Linked from Lockers page not in main nav.
In order to better rank the PPE lockers page (the page does need better onpage optimisation) I was thinking of product additional content, user guide/blogs - linking to the page this way.
My struggle is, I don't have the ability to control the top navigation - it's automatic and won't show links to level 3 pages.
Becky
-
Think CRAWL BUDGET
the crawl budget is the number of requests made by Googlebot to your website in a particular period of time. In simple terms, it’s the number of opportunities to present Google the fresh content on your website.
See this to understand
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/optimize-crawl-budget-tips-examples/
If you ever repeat a URL path more than twice, the URL will not be indexed. For example, this URL would not be indexed in Google.
Even if the repeated paths are broken up by another unique path, the URL will not be indexed. e.g.
This URL would not be indexed.
example.com/path/path/unique/path/
This is because Google thinks it has hit a URL trap.
URL traps occur most often when a relative link includes the same path as where the page is located. Relative URLs are added to the end of the paths of the URL which contains the link.
For example, if you had a page like example.com/path/page.html, which included a relative link back to itself using “/path/page1.html”, the actual URL of the link is example.com/path/path/page1.html. If this page is returned by the server, it will contain another relative link to “/path/page1.html”, which is actually the URL example.com/path/path/path/page1.html. And so ad infinitum.
See https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/never-repeat-pathnames-in-urls-more-than-twice/
Build Your Universal Navigation
- Identify why visitors come to your site. You probably have a pretty good idea of what people want already, but check your web analytics:
- What search terms do visitors use before they get to your site? Keywords used by incoming visitors tell you what your visitors were looking for before they clicked through to your site. Follow up to see which pages they visited - did they find what they were looking for?
- If you’re tracking internal site search, what search terms do visitors use once they’re on your site? On average, only 10% of visitors use site search. So, it’s safe to assume that most people only use site search if they have a hard time finding what they want with your navigation. What terms are visitors searching for? Do you have that page? Is it hidden?
- What pages on your site get the most traffic? If those are the pages that you want to get the most traffic, keep those in mind as you build your navigational structure to make sure they're easy for visitors to find. If they aren't particularly high conversion pages, what's a similar page that you can steer those visitors to?
- What are your top exit pages? If they’re locations or external contact information, that’s probably something a lot of your visitors are looking for. You should include that in your top navigation.
Divide your products/key pages into categories.
- Usability experts recommend “card sorting”: put your products on cards, lay them out on a flat surface so you can see them all, and cluster similar items together. There are also a few websites out there that will let you sort cards without taking up so much floor space:http://www.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort.htm andhttp://uxpunk.com/websort/
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/
Hope this helps,
Tom
- Identify why visitors come to your site. You probably have a pretty good idea of what people want already, but check your web analytics:
-
Hi,
Ideally, you want everything that's important as high up the menu structure as possible without making it too unusable for actual customers.
If it's 3 levels deep, then it's starting to get to the stage where I'd either look to move the category up if it's an important one, or possible merge it with something else that's relevant to be able to get it higher in the menu structure. Ultimately it's about managing your crawl budget and if you're burying something 3+ levels down, it's less likely to be regularly crawled unless it's incredibly popular from external links etc.
Flatter, shallower navigation and menus are always best as long as they're still usable...
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
-
Does an EAT score on my YMYL site impact my rankings?
I've read some conflicting information on YMYL and EAT. If the Google Quality Raters are out there reviewing YMYL pages and scoring them on EAT, does that site's score have an impact on that page's/site's ranking?
Algorithm Updates | | BFMichael0 -
Does cached duplicate content hurts seo by Google
If we have duplicate content or pages cached in Google which has been indexed months back, still it hurts the original pages? Old URLs with cache can be seen now in Google when we search for the same URLs.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Same Meta description is being shown on Google?
Not sure why this is happening but when you this command into Google site:"mywebsite": + "key phrase" It brings up pages from my website which have the key phrase but I have noticed that Google is using the wrong meta description for all of them even though these pages all have their own unique meta description Does anyone know why this would be happening? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | webguru20140 -
Will increased pagerank increase traffic from google?
I got notified that my domain went from a google pagerank of 3 to 4. When this happens, does google raise me in the searches which can then hopefully get me more traffic, or is it a worthless number. Maybe only google knows 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BrickPicker0 -
Google and Wikipedia
Ok, I love Wikipedia as much as the next guy but the amount of weight that google puts on this site is getting crazy. My search terms that I am going after are "speakers" and "loudspeakers" Can somebody tell me why wikipedia needs the top 8 -10 spots for those terms? is that really a good search result for users of google? More of a rant then a question I know. I just needed to get that off my chest!.
Algorithm Updates | | kevin48030 -
Should I use canonical tags on my site?
I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc. As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it. Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order. However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page. Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that! Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!
Algorithm Updates | | edu-SEO0 -
Will google punish us for using formulaic keyword-rich content on different pages on our site?
We have 100 to 150 words of SEO text per page on www.storitz.com. Our challenge is that we are a storage property aggregator with hundreds of metros. We have to distinguish each city with relevant and umique text. If we use a modular approach where we mix and match pre-written (by us) content, demographic and location oriented text in an attempt to create relevant and unique text for multiple (hundreds) of pages on our site, will we be devalued by Google?
Algorithm Updates | | Storitz0