Architecture questions.
-
I have two architecture related questions.
-
Fewer folders is better. For example, www.site.com/product should rank better than www.site.com/foldera/folderb/product, all else constant. However, to what extreme does it make sense to remove folders? With a small site of 100 or so pages, why not put all files in the main directory? You'd have to manually build the navigation versus tying navigation to folder structure, but would the benefit justify the additional effort on a small site?
-
I see a lot of sites with expansive footer menus on the home page and sometimes on every page. I can see how that would help indexing and user experience by making every page a click or two apart. However, what does that do to the flow of link juice? Does Google degrade the value of internal footer links like they do external footer links? If Google does degrade internal footer links, then having a bunch of footer links would waste link juice by sending a large portion of juice through degraded links, wouldn't it?
Thank you in advance,
-Derek
-
-
Hi James,
It sounds like when you consolidated widgets, you gave Google more of a focused page for persons to search for vs a larger number of pages on the same product. This is interesting as it is the inverse of the long tail effect. You would think that more pages around a given product would be better. I guess this would be a search case where too many pages was a bad thing. Makes me think of how we setup pagination to make sure Google does not focus on p 2,3,4,5 etc but work the noindexes to have focus on page 1 of the pagination.
Thanks for the post!
-
Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?
Thanks!
-
Thanks, I've noticed the site: www issue that you mention, but I'm coming around to the idea that it's a result of other factors, not the length of the url itself.
Do you think Google degrades internal footer links? Here is my concern illustrated in an example:
Image a home page with "40 points" of link juice to pass on. It has 4 links and 2 of them are footer links. Do you think 34 points would transfer to other pages, allowing 15% for normal evaporation as juice is passed, or do you think Google might do something like this:
Body link 1: 8.5 pts
Body Link 2: 8.5 pts
Footer Link 1: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)
Footer Link 2: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)
Total: Only 27 pts passed (and 7pts of juice lost forever)
This is how I'd imagine excessive footer links hurting a site. I have no idea if it works this way in reality. However, most would agree that external links in the footer are not worth as much as body links, so why would that logic not be applied to internal, navigational links?
SEOmoz has extensive footer links on the home page. Anyone from SEOmoz want to explain how SEOmoz evaluated the use of footer links?
-
Regarding footer links... Google more or less knows they are footer links and treats them as such. If it doesn't make much sense to have so many links then don't. There are better ways to drill down to crucial content that is not one click away from home page nav in general (e.g. content!).
URL length does not matter, but it's good to have a nice hierarchy for clarity (much like breadcrumbs) - however I have noticed an interesting thing... when you do site: Google (among other things) sorts site pages by URL length, starting from shorter down to longer URLs. Does this impact rankings? Maybe. How much? Probably to a tiny digree if at all.
-
I think the question is about conversion too. Everyone wants to find the content they are interested in quickly. Smaller more specific categories do that.
Lumpng content into a flatter structure sounds like it's going to be harder to find the page they want. My 2c.
btw, #2, I still dont understand why sites bother with footer links other than the ubiquitous privacy/terms/contact links which are nofollowed anyway..
-
I tend to agree with you. I suspect that urls with fewer folders rank better because of the flow of juice to those pages, not only because of the number of folders. www.site.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/content.html would probably rank fine if it had a direct link from the home page.
-
Hi There!
I do not believe that the folder structure of your site will have any impact on the way the search engines rank your pages. Your site architechture sholud be logical, and built in the same way that you would create an outline (major categories, subcategories, etc.).
In addition, if you start building your site with all of your files in the main directory, as your site grows you will find it increasingly difficult to manage, and will wish that you had built a well thought-out folder structure. Your folder structure should also be a nice way to get each page raked for the product or service that is featured - as the url is a valuable ranking factor.
Regarding link juice and your site footer - you should make a user friendly footer, the kind that you would find helpful as a visitor to your own site. Forget about link juice. In the works of Matt Cutts, "let it flow free", and focus on quality and making your site nice for visitors.
On the other hand, massive numbers of links could be an issue too - so dont forget to use the seoMoz On-Page Report Card optimzation tool which will give you specific suggestions on managing links and page structure for the best SEO results. It was massively valuable for me.
Best Wishes!
-
FYI, this is a B2B lead gen site. I agree having a flat site with everything a click or 2 away is best. My question is a little more specific and revolves around whether these tactics are worth the time and effort
-
I could manually build navigation and have all of my pages in the main directory or maybe 1 folder deep, OR dynamically build navigation based on folder structure and maybe have a site with many of my pages 2 or 3 folders deep. Any benefit to the former, because the latter is definitely easier.
-
Are extensive footer links generally a net benefit? Looks like SEOmoz uses them.
-
-
Obviously the less clicks to your money pages, the better. Assuming an ecommerce site, can you reach all your product pages with 3 clicks? That's always my goal. I have sub-categories only when needed, and in fact just went through a re-write where I replaced some sub-categories with "richer" product pages that asked more questions. In simple terms I replaced /blue-widgets, /red-widgets, /green-widgets with /widgets that asked the customer what color they wanted.
The result was my conversion rate almost doubled - and traffic has increased so google liked something
I would remove footer links - just worthless noise at best, or viewed as spammy at worst..
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
-
Information Architecture/URL Structure of a Consolidated Website
I am working on a project for a company that is going through a major transition. They are deciding to move from a subscription publisher to a digital membership content site. They are ALSO consolidating their sub-brands into one, becoming a branded house. They are a publisher of a niche-hobby, whose base is extremely passionate about the overarching topic. Currently, each sub-brand has its own website with its own branded content. Their new "mega-site" will have all content combined on one domain. Their goal is to appeal to a new user who has overlapping interests in one core topic, while also allowing their existing users and brand loyalists to be able to navigate the site by brand if they want to . If users land on the main domain HP, they will see a simple global navigation where they can navigate the content by topic OR select a brand. Each sub-brand will have it's own sub-navigation. We are currently at the phase where we are working on information architecture and trying to figure out the global nav and the nav for each individual brand. I am A) looking for advice on the best analytics reports to use to help inform navigation decisions and how to categorize content, and B) trying to decide if I should keep the BRANDED content in a sub-folder, or if I should categorize the content by topic and then tag branded content. I'm not concerned about how users will be able to filter the content because that will be easier to figure out. I'm just trying to decide what the main URLs should be when content can be navigated to in multiple ways. Would it be easier to redirect brand1.domain.com > domain.com/brand-1....? Are there benefits to doing it that way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | triveraseo0 -
Question on AMP
I'd like to utilize AMP for faster loading for one of my clients. However, it is essential that this client have chat. My developer is having trouble incorporating chat with AMP, and he claims that it isn't possible to integrate the two. Can anyone advise me as to whether this is accurate? If it is true that AMP and chat aren't compatible, are there any solutions to this issue? I'd appreciate any leads on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Question regarding Site and URL structure + Faceted Navigation (Endeca)
We are currently implementing the SEO module for Endeca faceted navigation. Our development team has proposed URLs to be structured in this way: Main category example: https://www.pens.com/c/pens-and-writing/ As soon as a facet is selected, for example "blue ink" - The URL path would change to https://www.pens.com/m/pens-and-writing/blue-ink/_/Nvalue (the "N" value is a unique identifier generated by Endeca that determines what products from the catalog are served as a match for the selected facet and is the same every time that facet is selected, it is not unique per user). My gut instinct says that this change from "/c/" to "/m/" might be very problematic in terms of search engines understanding that /m/pens-and-writing/blue-ink/ as part of the /c/pens-and-writing/ category. Wouldn't this also potentially pose a problem for the flow of internal link equity? Has anyone ever seen a successful implementation using this methodology?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Redirect question | new blog install on subdomain
Hi, I am running a wordpress site and our blog has grown to have a bit of a life of its own. I would like to use a more blog-oriented wordpress theme to take advantage of features that help with content discoverability, which is what the current theme I'm using doesn't really provide. I've seen sites like Canva, Mint and Hubspot put their blog on a subdomain, so the blog is sort of a separate site within a site. Advantages I see to this approach: Use a separate wordpress theme Help the blog feel like its own site and increase user engagement Give the blog its own name and identity My questions are: Are there any other SEO ramifications for taking this approach? For example, is a subdomain (blog.mysite.com) disadvantageous somehow, or inferior to to mysite.com/article-title? Regarding redirects, I read a recent Moz article about how 301s now do not lose page rank. I would also be able to implement https when I redirect, which is a plus. Is this an ok approach? Assuming I have to create redirect rules manually for each post though Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mikequery0 -
Pop up question and link flow?
Does a pop up like the one on this site www stressfreeprint co uk (top left corner about us, who we are) count as an external link or would link juice not flow to it. I like to have a few pages that i don't want to waste link juice on but would still like to have them and hope this is the answer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Canonicals question ref canonicals pointing to redundant urls
Hi, SCENARIO: A site has say 3 examples of the same product page but with different urls because that product fits into 3 different categories e.g. /tools/hammer /handtools/hammer /specialoffers/hammer and lets say the first 2 of those have the canonical pointing to /specialoffers/hammer YET that page is now redundant e.g. the webmaster decided to do away with the /specialoffers/ folder. ASSUMPTIONS: That is going to seriously hamper the chances of the 2 remaining versions of the hammer page being able to rank as they have canonicals pointing to a url that no longer exists. The canonical tags should be changed to point to 1 of the remaining url versions. As an added complication - lets say /specialoffers/hammer still exists, the url works, but just isn't navigable from the site. Thoughts/feedback welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Do allow or disavow, that is the question!
We're in the middle of a disavow process and we're having some difficulty deciding whether or not to disavow links from Justia.com and prweb.com - justia.com alone is giving us 23,000 links with just 76 linked pages. So, to allow, or disavow? That's the question! What do you think guys? Thank you. John.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0