Internal Site Structure Question (URL Formation and Internal Link Design)

[BeytzNet]

Hi,

I have an e-commerce website that has an articles section:

There is an articles.aspx file that can be reached from the top menu and it holds links to all of the articles as follows:

xxx.com/articles/article1.aspx
xxx.com/articles/article2.aspx

I want to add several new articles under a new sections, for example a complete set of articles under the title of "buying guide" and the question is what would be the best way?

I was thinking of adding a "computers-buying-guides.aspx" accessible from the top menu / footer and from it linking to:

xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/what-to-check-prior-to-buying-a-laptop.aspx
xxx.com/computer-buying-ghudes/weight-vs-performance.aspx 
etc.

Any thoughts / recommendations?

Thanks

[Brother22]

With an eCommerce site I would always recommend having as flat of a site architecture as possible. This make's it easy for the spiders to crawl and the users to find the content without having to dig or land through a SERP. If you are adding new content to your article section that you want to be unrelated to the existing content in the current sub-folder being used, then creating a directory to house the new content with a more descriptive sub-folder name is the best idea in my opinion. I would make sure to have the link in the header OR the footer but not both. Just design it for whatever makes sense from the user's end and you will be in good shape.

I would also recommend that you label the pages with the Google recommendation tags (rel=next, rel=prev, and the not-so-trusty rel="canonical") and identify those pages you don't want indexed with Bing URL Normalization.

[anthonytjm]

Ok, on your current articles page, make sure you don't exceed 100 links on that page including all other site navigation.If you do, create a second articles page and start listing articles on that page to balance the load out for the regular articles section. If your getting likes and good feedback i would change that. If you ever had to, simply 301 redirect so you pass all the link juice to new page.

I think I would then create a new top level link under articles called buying guide and have that link to a buying-guide articles page where you can layout your buying guide articles in like fashion to your original articles landing page.

Hope that makes sense. I can see it in my mind but sometimes that's hard to put in type.

[BeytzNet]

What I currently have is like your second suggestion, main page with many articles sections. However I have too many articles on it.

Besides, I believe that the guides section will be very good and is worth standing on its own.

The reason I'm not changing the structure of the existing articles is simply because the articles there already have many social signals (likes etc.) which I don't want to lose when I change the URL.

[anthonytjm]

If your planning on adding several different article directories why not have a main articles link from main navigation, then have droop down menus for sub directory articles? So it would look something like this:

/articles/

/articles/buying-guide/

/articles/software/

/articles/hardware/

etc, etc, etc.

Or you could have your main articles landing page list all links under various sub categories with H tag titles separating the directories.