Site Architecture Trade Off

[PerchDigital]

Hi All

I'm looking for some feedback regarding a site architecture issue I'm having with a client. They are about to enter a re-design and as such we're restructuring the site URLs and amending/ adding pages.

At the moment they have ranked well off the back of original PPC landing pages that were added onto the site, such as www.company.com/service1, www.company.com/service2, etc

The developer, from a developer point of view wished to create a logical site architecture with multiple levels of directories etc. I've suggested this probably isn't the best way to go, especially as the site isn't that large (200-300 pages) and that the key pages we're looking to rank should be as high up the architecture as we can make them, and that this amendment could hurt their current high rankings.

It looks like the trade off may be that the client is willing to let some pages be restructured so for example, www.company.com/category/sub-category/service would be www.company.com/service.

However, although from a page basis this might be a solution, is there a drawback to having this in place for only a few pages rather than sitewide? I'm just wondering if these pages might stick out like a sore thumb to Google.

[PerchDigital]

Hi Dejan

Thanks, all good points so much appreciated.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Firstly URL effect is minor in comparison to the actual navigational hierarchy.

I give preference to short and neat URLs however www.company.com/category/sub-category/service doesn't sound terrible to me. What would be my primary concern is if this is how you get to that page:

Home > Category > Sub Category > Service (3 clicks)

If this "Service" is a key service to your client then it would be wise to create navigational wormholes to drill through from say home page or top level category page and label it as "popular" or within a piece of text.

In a website with 200-300 pages PageRank distribution and indexation should not be a problem (assuming you have decent links) so there is no huge need for flattening site architecture to the point where you have 1000 links on each page.

I have heard Matt Cutts validate this point in at least two or three of his videos stating that linking your main content from as high as possible is the key.