Good Internal Site Structure Idea?
-
Hello SEOMoz,
After reading a bunch of your Site Structure articles, I've decided to make ours more flat. There are numerous pages on our site which are linked to directly from our homepage, wasting mysterious amounts of Link Juice every day. I want to remove most of these links so that the Fewer, and now more heavily weighted, Homepage Links will be more powerful... but I am worried that the pages which I am knocking down to the 3rd tier level already have high rank and are distributing this Juice to other pages.
The problem is that 3 of these 9 pages are great for assisting our sales team, so I cannot take those 2 links off of the homepage...so I will be forced to Nofollow them instead. I am worried this is cutting down the number of pages on the site, also cutting out content which was previously indexed. Is this whole thing a good idea at all?
And should I just leave those 2 pages alone because I can't remove the link? I'm thinking maybe I should rel=canonical it back to the homepage? I am ultimately trying to rank the homepage for the keyword "POS Software" and this is my on-site strategy for it. Maybe adding a link from those 2 pages that say "POS Software" back to the homepage is the best bet in this scenario? I am trying to learn the absolute best thing to do instead of guessing.
Thanks!
Derek
-
OK, so, a flat architecture would suggest more links on the homepage, not less. You're trying to reduce the number of clicks from the homepage to each piece of content, not increase it.
If there's good quality content on those pages that helps your sales team, leave it up! If it helps the sales team, then removing it will probably cost you sales, right? I'd stay away from nofollowing those links, and I'd stay away from using rel="canonical", since the way you mentioned using it isn't how it should be used.
Removing 9 links from the homepage won't do all that much for you IMO. I'm looking at your homepage now. I don't think you need to worry about removing internal links. I would recommend changing the links for "QuickBooks, Peachtree, Simply Accounting, MAS 90, MAS 200, and Line 50." Either remove the links and leave the text, OR a better solution would be to link them to an internal page on the site such as /quickbooks-pos-integration.html, and target those types of keywords. But definitely don't link to quickbooks.com's homepage, they don't need that link juice and it isn't valuable to visitors.
Taking a look at the link metrics for your site, you're at homepage PA 53 and DA 43, which isn't far off from the page 1 ranking sites. I think some link building would make you much more competitive for that keyword. You're currently on page 4 when I search for "POS software", and it's an internal page that's ranking, not your homepage. Get more links to your homepage using POS Software as the anchor text, and do it in a non-spammy way. That will help quite a bit I think.
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
-
On-Page Optimization on a service based Site?
Respected members, my question is that if I Wanna run a website that provide service like olansi do, But i need to know the On -page effect like How Can I make a plan to secure my position against my Service based competitor site?
On-Page Optimization | | younus_7831 -
Can the Lightboxes on My Site be Crawled?
I'm trying to optimize my site, but I have lightboxes and I don't know if they are visible to the search engines. If they aren't, could you suggest something that I could do? THANK YOU so much!!!!! My site is lymphexpo.com
On-Page Optimization | | bosleypalmer0 -
Good idea to use hidden text for SEO purposes due to picky clients not allowing additional content?
I do SEO for eCommerce websites both in-house and for clients. A few of our clients want increased rankings but are not willing to allow us to make the changes internally to help make that happen. One of which is adding content to the webpages since 90% of them have very little to none. I have a couple clients that are extremely picky about what can be seen on their eCommerce website. They have the site setup the way they want it but it is not SEO friendly in the slightest. The pages (including homepage) have little to no content, and the only things they want changed are things visitors CANNOT see on the webpages (META, ALT Tags etc). The tactic i am wanting to use is often used by spammers but i have a legitimate reason to use this and wanted to know if this would be a good idea. They are wanting to target fairly competitive keywords but are unwilling to allow any on-page changes to add any information and keywords to help with rankings. I was thinking about adding text behind images or hide the text in whatever ways to prevent the end user from viewing it (except for the search engines). My idea was simply to add a paragraph or two of content for the search engines purely to help in ranking because they have a lot of pages that have zero content except for product image and title listings. Is this tactic recommended or does anyone have any other ideas for these type of situations. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | VITALBGS
Stephen0 -
Internal linking structure
howdy SEO moz people, I had a quick question about internal linking. I am using the WP platform for my website and on one of the widgets I have a category widget that shows all the pages, (on every page). I wanted to know that when if i make a new post or page does it matter if the internal anchor texts are on the content itself or is it suffice to have it on the side bar within the widget? Basically what im asking is does it matter if i have anchor text links on the content itself or is it ok to have it anywhere on the page. and if it does matter to have it on the content, please help out on any suggestions on where to place them. thanks
On-Page Optimization | | david3050 -
Why is our site dropping in Domain Authority
Hi all, I have a question. I have been working SEO on our site www.betxpert.com for the last 4-6 weeks and I have been looking forward to seeing the new DA and PA numbers. However today, our DA is now 30...where it was 31 or 33 a couple of days ago. How come the decrease? I have only improved the site i should say... Hope someone can shed a little light on the issue... -Rasmus
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
How to make google not index quotes from other sites?
Hey guys, I have a site where we post quite a lot of info from other sites. We don't want google to de-index our pages because parts of it are quotes from other sites. What would you use to make it so Google sees it's a quote from another site? Or to just make Google not index the quote? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | StefanJDorresteijn0 -
URL structure for a new WordPress site
Hi I'm building a new next big thing website from scratch (for a translation agency) and I encountered an issue with the URL structure. I need to chose the URL for important targeted keyword pages and I have a conflict between two tools I'm using. Please read below the situation: domain: mashtranslation.com target keyword: french translation services which URL you think is better from a SEO point of view (and possibly for users): mashtranslation.com/services/french/ OR mashtranslation.com/french-translation-services/ I'm asking this because one WordPress plugin (Wordpress SEO by Yoast) says the URL structure is not optimised while another tool (Market Samurai) says the URL is optimised.
On-Page Optimization | | flo20 -
A good title for each page on my website.
Dear SEOs, I know these facts: a) not more than 70 chars b) relevant to the page subject - probably best keyword at the beginning My problem - should I rebuild the current structure of my titles which is: Main Page keywords (in my case 4) | domain name - Main Page Sub-page - one click from main page keywords (again same 4) | domain name - Sub Page Name (or as you like Category Name) Specific page with an article / content keywords (again same 4 as on any other) | domain name - category name - title of article same as used in tag To be more precise, should this title be changed for following pages: Sub Page - where really it's page that let's you chose particular subjects (there will be few article for each subjects) so should the keywords be changed to - "chose your category" Specific page with an article - should the category name - title of article be completely removed and first part of title which at the moment contains same 4 keywords used on main page be replaced with keywords specific for the content ? To be honest I find those titles at the moment bit confusing and sort of illogical. But since I can't really change anything in the code I would like to know what's the right way before I keep pressing on the programmer 🙂 Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | lolskizz0