What counts as a "deeper level" in SEO?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

I am trying to make our site more crawlable and get link juice to the "bottom pages" in an ecommerce site.

Currently, our site has a big mega menu - and we have:

Home >

CAT 1
            SUBCAT 1
                  SUBSUBCAT 1
                            PRODUCT

Our URL Structure looks:
www.domain.com/cat1/subcat1/subsubcat1/ and here are the links to the products but the URL's look like: www.domain.com/product.html

Obviously the ideal thing would be to cut out one of the CATEGORIES. But I may be unable to do that in the short term - so I was wondering if by taking CAT1 out of the equation - e.g., just make it a static item that allows the drop down menu to work, but no page for it -

Does that cut out a level?

Thanks,

Ben

[bjs2010]

Thanks for that - I think what I am trying to do is somehow cut the linkjuice dilution - my DA is weak and the mega menu contains around 150 links with all the cats / subcats... so my link juice is diluted all over the place.

We have 1750 products but only 50 hits per day -

Any suggestions?

www.eHYPHENcocinasplusDOTcom.

Thanks

[SEOAndy]

As tom suggests, it won't be easy. I've a number of clients with this kind of multi-category set up (one is 5 layers deep!) and its really hard to get juice down to those levels consistently.

For example if you've a product 2 layers deep it seems to be twice as easy for it to gain traction as if it were 4 layers down. This isn't to say it can't be done, it can, but put simply it means you have to really push links at it externally and in social.

Also it sounds like you would benefit from splitting your sitemap by category to that you can focus some attention within sitemaps to these pages rather than have it be one of ten thousand entries.

[JarnoNijzing]

I agree with Tom here.

Never go beyond the third level. We use TIER 0 till Tier 3 in our case for most websites.

Hopes this helps some

regards

Jarno

[TomRayner]

The key thing to consider here is whether or not that product page is accessible in any other way.

Take the URL appearance out of the equation and look for the quickest route to navigate to that product page.  If it takes more than 3 steps to get to, you can think of it as a "deep page" and it may take longer to crawl.

Removing a category would help, but only if that is reflected in the navigation on the site and not just the URL appearance.

Of course, if a product page has a lot of external links going towards it and is featured prominantely in an XML sitemap, it negates the worry of it being not crawled as often to a degree.  Ideally, you want your core landing pages or product pages as close to the root domain as possible (1 or 2 steps).  3 is usually the maximum for best practice, but with enough links and social shares Google will recognise it as an important page in its own right and will frequently recrawl it.