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
-
New Google Update - weird ranking
Hi I wanted to get your thoughts on this keyword ranking. This page - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/albatross-heavy-duty-office-chairs-24-stone is now ranking for heavy duty office chair 30 stone We don't mention 30 in the content anywhere, apart from the USPs at the top of the page - could this be it?! I don't know how to change this, or I guess Google is still figuring things out and maybe this will drop off? Love to get some thoughts on this! Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Meta Descriptions - Google ignores what we have
Hi I still write meta descriptions to help with CTR. I am currently looking at a page where the CTR needs improving. I check the meta on Google SERPs & it isn't pulling through the meta description we have - but other info on the page. This isn't ideal - why does this happen? Will Google just make the decision and are descriptions not worth writing?
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Bounce rates: Google vs others
Hello Mozzers, I was wondering if anyone could share some insight into how Google calculates bounce rates vs other analytics out there. We use both Google analytics and Clicky here. I've made several changes and additions to the website in hopes to increase traffic, optimization and reduce bounce rates. So far so good on all fronts. However I do notice bounce rates are way higher on google analytics than Clicky. While I get a bounce rate of 20%-29% on Clicky, Google has me way up the 50's or 60%s. I've read a few articles on it but I'm still a bit confused. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | md30 -
Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
Site titles / descriptions change - Google Algo Change ?
Hello, During the weekend 4 of our sites automatically changed their search titles and descriptions at the same time.
Algorithm Updates | | lordish
They are not picking up the real pages: Title, Description. Our ranks are dropping because of this. can you please tell if it happened to you as well or if you recognize a problem here? sites:
http://www.robinhoodbingo.com
http://www.gossipbingo.com
http://www.moonbingo.com in the attached examples:
for the kws searched - the results show different titles and descriptions. results for these pages:
moon bingo - http://www.moonbingo.com
mobile bingo - http://www.robinhoodbingo.com/skin/mobile.php rhMzURw.png 2tRL5dZ.png0 -
Pages fluctuating +/- 70 positions in Google SERPs?
I've got some pages that appear somewhere around #25 in Google. Every now and then, it just goes away from the top 100 results for a few days (even up to a week) and then it comes back. I've got other pages that rank around #8 which falls down to about #75 for a while and then it comes back. But while a page may be gone from the top 100 results in the US, it still ranks at about the same place everywhere else in the world (+/- 10 positions). I've seen this happen in the past but never it happened so often. What gives?!?
Algorithm Updates | | sbrault740 -
Server Location & SEO
So I just read an interesting Tweet: #SEO Tip: #Google takes into account the location of the server (the IP) when projecting the search results #web This is something I had not thought of. I suppose my question then is HOW does it factor this information into it's results? For some reason, one of our sites is hosted on a Canadian server. We are a cloud hosting company and we serve all of NA with data centers in the US and Canada... For whatever reason we've used the Canadian server farm for our web server. Could this possibly be hurting our NA google SERPs? Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Algorithm Updates | | jesse-landry0 -
7 Pack Google Serps?
What is the best way to get into the 7 pack of google serps? I have a site that ranked well before this changed but not was pushed back to page 2. I have Unique content and I currently have provided my info to all the standard local sites, like Yelp, Manta, Local.com and others. I already have a Google Local page and I also have links from local sites. What else can be done?
Algorithm Updates | | bronxpad0