Site Architecture: How flat is too flat?
-
There's a lot of debate out there as far as too many internal links or too many levels of a website. I've seen the videos from Rand and I've read a lot of the posts here on Moz, but I just want to know where everyone stands on this. Anyone have experience with architecture while working on a large E-commerce site? We're talking Millions of pages and over 1,000 links off the homepage alone.
Anyways, I don't want to get too specific. I mostly just want to hear about experiences of the community.
Thanks!
-
I hear ya! I find one of the biggest issues ecommerce sites have with rankings has to do with their data. That and a lack of canonicalization to help Google figure out which are the money pages.
-
We first rolled out the Homepage link reduction project back in July of 2013. I was hoping to make it a full year, but it seems as though the higher-ups are ready to move on (seeing as though it's been close to 10 months, I can't really blame them).
However, I should mention that we did see a hefty increase in the overall number of pages in Google's index. It's really too bad that those indexed pages never really converted in to web traffic, but I would say that we have some site clean-up to perform and some page quality issues we should be checking in to as well.
I suppose it's nice to know that when we end up making the proper changes to our site content/quality, we could try and adjust our site architecture again (and this time we'll have some figures to benchmark against).
Thanks again!
-
Hey Gerry,
How much time elapsed between implementation of new directories and did you put redirects in place to ensure you didn't lose any link equity in the process? If I were you, I'd give it several months before I passed judgment. Also, you might not feel a benefit if traffic and links are low, but will later down the line as both of those things pick up.
D
-
Thanks for getting back to me, Donna! I would have thought the same thing as what you mentioned, however, we programmed a bit of a workaround to reduce the links on the homepage, yet, putting one more step between the homepage and the product pages (i.e. if the product pages used to be 3 steps away, but with over 1,000 links on the homepage, we put the product pages 4 steps away and reduced the total number of homepage links to under 300). The results weren't terribly affective (effective?), but the reduction in the homepage links did not boost traffic at all. In fact, there was an almost immediate drop (although, not too significant) in traffic across the board.
There's no doubt in my mind that the workaround we implemented was not the cleanest way to roll out the changes, but I would have thought we would see just a slight change in traffic - in the right direction, that is.
Either way, thanks again for getting back to me. We've decided to rollback the changes that were made so I'll be sure to keep you updated on the trends we see afterwards.
Regards,
Gerry Mendiola
-
I have experience with a very large ecommerce site with hundreds of thousands of pages and a completely flat architecture. It's not good. Think of the distribution of your link equity like you would an organ donation. Would you rather give two kidneys to two people or 200,000? Which choice is going to make a difference to the recipients?
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
-
Site with both subfolders and subdomains
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | medi_
I'm working on a website that has a quite extensive subfolder structure for product and multilingual purposes.
domain.com/en
domain.com/it
domain.com/fr
domain.com/en/category
domain.com/it/category
domain.com/fr/category
domain.com/en/category/product
domain.com/it/category/product
domain.com/fr/category/product
domain.com/en/category/product/region
domain.com/it/category/product/region
domain.com/fr/category/product/region
and so on... We will soon be launching a completely different service, which would make the subfolder structure become even more complex. As John Mueller recently stated that Subdomains and Subfolders are treated the same by Google, I am now considering building that new service under subdomains for product reason, and for the sake of clarity. 1- Would my subdomains inherit the authority of my main domain?
2- Do I have to keep the language folders with the subdomain structure?
e.g.:
new-service.domain.com/en
nouveau-service.domain.com/fr
nuovo-servizio.domain.com/it OR
new-service.domain.com
nouveau-service.domain.com
nuovo-servizio.domain.com Looking forward to reading you!0 -
International Site Migration
Hi guys, In the process of launching internationally ecommerce site (Magento CMS) for two different countries (Australia and US). Then later on expand to other countries like the UK, Canada, etc. The plan is for each country will have its own sub-folder e.g. www.domain.com/us, www.domain.com.au/au, www.domain.com.au/uk A lot of the content between these English based countries are the same. E.g. same product descriptions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
So in order to prevent duplication, from what I’ve read we will need to add Hreflang tags to every single page on the site? So for: Australian pages: United States pages: Just wanted to make sure this is the correct strategy (will hreflang prevent duplicate content issues?) and anything else i should be considering? Thankyou, Chris0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Why is my m-dot site outranking my main site in SERPs?
My client has a WP site and a Duda mobile site that we inherited. For some reason their m-dot site is ranking on P1 of Google for their top KWs instead of the main site which is much more robust. The main site might rank beyond page 5 when the generic home page for their m-dot site appears on P1. Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Broken Links from Open Site Explorer
I am trying to find broken internal links within my site. I found a page that was non-existent but had a bunch of internal links pointing to that page, so I ran an Open Site Explorer report for that URL, but it's limited to 25 URLs. Is there a way to get a report of all of my internal pages that link to this invalid URL? I tried using the link: search modifier in Google, but that shows no responses.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
Because Goolge chose this link to my site?
I'm better ranked in Google for that link (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/paginas/ensaios.html) and not in (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/), you know you explain why? In all keywords, except that (luxury escorts in Rio de Janeiro) Sorry my english, I'm from Brazil and I'm using Google translator.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMaster0210 -
Not ranking well after site was hacked
My site was hacked and that seemed to have a pretty big effect on search rankings. I'm pretty sure I've gotten the hack completely removed (as of 10/16.) During the hack and even now, all of my posts created after Aug 1 don't rank in regular Google searches at all even if I search for the titles in quotes. But I can tell they are indexed because I see them when I do a site search in Google. And I see that they are cached. Posts from before Aug 1 rank well in Google searches. The issue with August and after posts no longer appearing started in mid September. Prior to that the some of the August posts were actually performing very well. The September date corresponds to when we first started working on removing the hack. It looks like the August and after posts all have a pagerank of 0, whereas the mozrank is much higher. I've request reconsideration from Google and was told that no manual action was taken against my site. I know that's a lot of background, but I'm wondering how long do I need to wait before the August and after posts start ranking? Is there anything I can do in the mean time to address this pagerank issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris-at-Magoosh0 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0