How much is the site architecture impacting my site?

[robhough909]

Hi there,

I'm interested to learn how much the site archecture of griffith.ie (higher education) maybe impacting our rankings. In recent months there was some changes to the the faculty landing pages but not to the site archecture.

The rankings in the last 6 months have dipped a little.

There are two main path ways to get to the course.

1. Course finder - https://www.griffith.ie**/find-a-course** =>

2. Faculties - https://www.griffith.ie**/faculties**

Most of the SEO authority is coming through the Faculties pages as this is where all the courses are found in term of the url structure.

For example; https://www.griffith.ie**/faculties/**business/courses/ba-hons-accounting-finance

The UX on the site tells a different story and directs people to the course finder.  /find-a-course

Ideally, I feel the site would benefit much more if all the traffic was directed through the course finder however this would require (I think) a big redevelopment of the search tool and

I feel we are diluting our efforts as when somebody arrives to the site through the homepage they go through the course finder and if they come through specific searches they get taken to the specific course page under the faculty section.

the site has has this archecture for the best part of 4 years and I'm considering recommend a change if it would greatly improve SEO and UX.

Any feedback on this would be great.

Many Thanks

Rob

[effectdigital]

Thank you Rob we have responded

[robhough909]

Hi Effectdigital,

Thanks you so much for this insightful and detailed feedback. I'm very impressed. I'm sending you a PM.

Best Regards,

Rob

[effectdigital]

This is the estimated performance and authority for the /faculties path and all of its contained sub-folders and pages:

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/prefix/live?target=www.griffith.ie%2Ffaculties

Screenshot: https://d.pr/i/D9gFrv.png

Here's the same thing for find a course:

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/prefix/live?target=www.griffith.ie%2Ffind-a-course

Screenshot: https://d.pr/i/t88UIa.png

Your faculties section has way more linking domains, organic keywords ranking on Google and has better SEO performance (generally). If you were to change the architecture so that our courses sit under the course finder, instead of under the faculties section (which is best-performing of the two) which links and pages might be impacted?

Here you can see the top pages listed inside of the /faculties section:

https://ahrefs.com/positions-explorer/top-pages/v2/prefix/ie/all/all/all/all/all/all/all/1/traffic_desc?target=www.griffith.ie%2Ffaculties

Screenshot: https://d.pr/i/LAa2dJ.png (I highlighted 'courses' related URLs with red boxes)

CSV Download: https://d.pr/f/Haz8WS.csv

It looks as if a lot of the top content is course related, so changing the URL architecture could potentially unseat a lot of powerful links and cause you some problems. Links to redirects, often aren't as powerful as directly connected links

Here are some of the best backlinks to the /faculties site section:

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/backlinks/v7/external-per-domain/prefix/live/all/all/all/1/ahrefs_rank_desc?target=www.griffith.ie%2Ffaculties

Screenshot: https://d.pr/i/nv3EWH.png (I highlighted 'courses' related backlinks with red boxes)

CVS Download: https://d.pr/f/JdJAPx.csv

Again, it seems that lots of decent links are actually hitting individual course URLs, which would make me feel uneasy about 'unseating' those links, by changing the URLs which they are supposed to land upon

In SEO, large architectural changes often do result in a short term dip and loss. By doing what you are proposing, you will cause short term disruption which could see lower results. Your hope would be that in the medium to long term, performance would increase beyond what you would have gained without the changes

A crude example would be something like this:

https://d.pr/i/f8HRub.png (this is a hypothetical line-chart, I'm not actually doing your forecasting for you based on external data only - that would be crazy!)

Your disruption will, in all likelihood disconnect some links and SEO authority from your site whilst making other links connect indirectly rather than directly (passing through 301 redirects). There's an efficiency loss here which means you're likely to see a dip. The question is, do you think that dip is worth it and how confident are you about achieving more than before - after the dip has run its course?

You could be lucky and not even see a dip if the contents of the pages will be exactly the same and it's (pretty much) only the URL which is changing. Google do check to see if the (last cached) origin URL for redirects, and the redirect destinations are similar - before allowing full SEO authority to flow through a 301 redirect (so even the mighty 301 is subject to checks, balances, and some degree of equity loss)

If you are really good at your 301s, harvesting all the legacy URLs with links (in addition to your live pages) then you can avoid a dip - but you have to be pretty pro with your data-sourcing, data aggregation and crawling skills. If that's not you, expect to encounter a small to medium dip - and to require more budget later for clean-up

I think your project would require a moderate amount of dev work, but even that can be expensive when trying to win budget from another department. Before you move ahead with this, you'll have to be very confident of the long-term gains with some data-led reasoning and insights

I can't make this decision for you, but hopefully some of my data will help you