Reassessing site achitecture
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Firstly I'm only a recently new member but am already a big fan and rely on the tools a lot.
For the sake of context, our site is www.cleancruising.com.au which we've steadily built into one of Australia's top cruise sites. We've focussed on building unique content including a mapping engine to show over 10,000 cruise routes, 3D ship models for virtual tour simulations and over 350,000 words of unique descriptive content. So we think we've got some good content which we currently rank quite well for, but think there's a lot of room for improvement with the links, both internal and inbound.
Looking at the internal links, I thought the site architecture was pretty good but now I'm not so sure. The site hierarchy is like this:
home > cruiseline (20) > ship (200) > itinerary page (12000) > enquiry form
and
home > region (25) > port (1400) > itinerary page (12000) > enquiry form
My question is, am I wasting link juice by doing the following? A sample itinerary page shows lots of links through to the enquiry form (with different parameters). However years ago we added the enquiry form to be blocked via robots.txt and none of these page variations are indexed by google. Is this stuffing up the link flow, and should I allow the forms to be indexed so their links can add value back through the site?
Are there any tools for visualizing a site link structure? Lots of questions and hope this is appropriate. 1am in Australia so may take a few hours before any follow up posts, cheers
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Ryan, thanks for this suggestion. I'm certainly rusty in a few areas! cheers
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Good suggestion Ryan.
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Instead of blocking it via robots.txt try blocking via a meta robots tag like below:
This way Google (and others) won't index the page but they will follow all of the links.
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