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
-
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
Severe health issues are found on your site. - Check site health (GWT)
Hi, We run a Magento website - When i log in to Google Webmaster Tools, I am getting this message: Severe health issues are found on your site. - <a class="GNHMM2RBFH">Check site health
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
</a>Is robots.txt blocking important pages? Some important page is blocked by robots.txt. Now, this is the weird part - the page being blocked is the admin page of magento - under
www.domain.com/index.php/admin/etc..... Now, this message just wont go away - its been there for days now - so why does Google think this is an "important page"? It doesnt normally complain if you block other parts of the site ?? Any ideas? THanks0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Reliable outsource site
Hi which is the most quality site to outsource my backlinks? freelancer.com odesk.com any other? From elance I am very disappointed. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?
I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Scapers and Other Sites Outranking
Post panda, there is definitely more talk about scrapers or other (more authoritative) sites outranking the original content creators in the SERPS. The most common way this problem is addressed (from what I've seen) is by rewriting the content and try your hardest to be the first one to be indexed or just ignoring it from an on page standpoint and do more link dev. Does anyone have any advice on the best way to address? Should site owners be looking deeper into their analytics and diagnostics before doing the rewrites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0