Site´s Architecture - Categories . What´s the best in my case?
-
My Dear friends of MOZ, I´ve got you a case that has been driving me crazy for 2 weeks, Im doing an SEO audit for big brand that sells electronics.
Since they sell all kind of electronics, and are very popular the site is quite big and has several categories.
Now...Im working particularly in a kind of micro-site that sells two kind of products that are very similar but not the same. Lets say in this site they are selling super-light-weight-Laptops and tablets, so if you look the site its a Laptop/Tablet site. But the site is not under a laptop/tablet directory, some pages are under laptop and others in Tablet directory .
For example : Home page URL: /light-laptops/home.asp ; Products general page page URL is light-pads/products.asp ; and each single product page is under laptops or pads according the type of product.
From my point of view, they should create a new directory called /light-laptops-pads/ and single directories for products, and case studies, etc.. Since they want to show both products together when you click in products (off course they will be creating sub-directories for the two types of products).
At the begining I thought they were really mistaken, but now that I see that all light-pad content is in one folder and light-laptops content is in another, and the site jumps from one category to the other I am a little bit confused. PLEASE HELP ME
PD: I want to make clear that general categories like products, case studies , contact us, solutions pages are in some cases under /light-pad/ directory and in other cases under /light-laptops / directory
PLEASE PARDON MY ENGLISH!
-
Pablo -
Yes, it would be better to have all of your domain authority under one main domain name, instead of spreading it thinly using subdomains.
Thanks,
-- Jeff
-
Hi Jeff,
Thanks a lot for your answers, I have read also the answers to the other threads you referred me.
I dont want to abuse from your time and kindnes, but I ve got one more question. The idea of creating a subdomain started circuling my mind, though Im not sure about this universe.
Like Vice and Mic I bring two cases to the table, but both are using subdomains in this case. www.mercadolibre.com (latinamerican Amazon) and sony.com .
Sony uses store.com for all their products listing, support.sony for support and sony.com for main navigation pages.
Mercado Libre uses listado.mercadolibre.com for most of their products and autos(cars).mercadolibre.com or ropa.mercadolibre.com for really important categories like clothes and cars ( that would bring Mercado Libre more revenue than other categories, I think is where they are more focused in).
Now I always thought the same way Matt Cutts explains in his article about subdomain, it should be made for keywords that aren´t too related to domain´s keywords. I remember creating an insurance subdomain for a brokerage firm.
The domain authority of the domain Im working in is already 92 I understand SEO efforts will only have repercussions in subdomain, but as I said domain authority is already 92 . On the other hand I should add another folder, and the site structure is already a little bit long, while using a subdomain will save me using at least one folder less.
Hope you can give me a hand with this.
Best Wishes.
Pablo
-
So, if this is a huge brand name with a high domain authority... it honestly won't matter as much how their category and URL structure is set up.
However, if they are using two different directories with specific information about each product, this would be fine as well. I think that having a site with two big / strong categories, but no general categories should be okay, especially if their DA is really strong.
Hope this helps!
- Jeff
-
Thanks a lot Jeff, really helpful information.
This brand is also a manufacturer, as big as Sony. I understand your way you would proceed with this and I have the same approach, but if we follow an intuitive architecture of categories, the one they are using is not that wrong, altough not all the categories correspond to the same microsite .
Let me be a little bit more graphical :
/ Business /directory
/light-laptops/ displayed in microsite A
/light-tablets/ displayed in microsite A
/projectors/ displayed in microsite b
/4k-displays/displayed in microsite c
I dont really know how wrong its what they are doing. If tomorrow they come up with more "light tablets" info they will host it in /light-laptops/ I know this is not classic SEO, but do you think this structure would affect rankings?
Questions:
Yes, they don t have one directory including both products at the same time, but they have two different directories with Specific info about each product. (also including products,contact and home page since there is no general directory for both categories) You think this wouldn t be a right way to divide categories?
Do you think having a site like they have with two big and strong categories and no general categories would affect SEO?
Thanks a lot!
-
Microsites can either be a separate domain name (i.e. www.domain-light-tablet-laptops.com) or a subdirectory off of your existing domain (i.e. www.domain.com/light-tablet/)
It sounds like you're going with the subdirectory option for the microsite. I think that this will be helpful, and add more SEO value to the microsite. Here's a link to a post on subdomains vs. subdirectories:
http://moz.com/community/q/revisited-the-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-questionMy recommendation, if you are to use a sub-directory, would be to have one top level, such as:
www.domain.com/light-tablets-laptops/If you don't need to have the home.asp, that might be better... but that's going to depend on your site and page system settings.
For your categories, you might go with:
www.domain.com/light-tablets-laptops/manufacturer/And for your product, you might go with:
www.domain.com/light-tablets-laptops/manufacturer/tablet-XYZ/For the contact page, I'd go with:
www.domain.com/light-tablets-laptops/contact/Hope this helps!
Thanks,
-- Jeff
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
-
I'm Pulling Hairs! - Duplicate Content Issue on 3 Sites
Hi, I'm an SEO intern trying to solve a duplicate content issue on three wine retailer sites. I have read up on the Moz Blog Posts and other helpful articles that were flooded with information on how to fix duplicate content. However, I have tried using canonical tags for duplicates and redirects for expiring pages on these sites and it hasn't fixed the duplicate content problem. My Moz report indicated that we have 1000s of duplicates content pages. I understand that it's a common problem among other e-commerce sites and the way we create landing pages and apply dynamic search results pages kind of conflicts with our SEO progress. Sometimes we'll create landing pages with the same URLs as an older landing page that expired. Unfortunately, I can't go around this problem since this is how customer marketing and recruitment manage their offers and landing pages. Would it be best to nofollow these expired pages or redirect them? Also I tried to use self-referencing canonical tags and canonical tags that point to the higher authority on search results pages and even though it worked for some pages on the site, it didn't work for a lot of the other search result pages. Is there something that we can do to these search result pages that will let google understand that these search results pages on our site are original pages? There are a lot of factors that I can't change and I'm kind of concerned that the three sites won't rank as well and also drive traffic that won't convert on the site. I understand that Google won't penalize your sites with duplicate content unless it's spammy. So If I can't fix these errors -- since the company I work conducts business where we won't ever run out of duplicate content -- Is it worth going on to other priorities in SEO like Keyword research, On/Off page optimization? Or should we really concentrate on fixing these technical issues before doing anything else? I'm curious to know what you think. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | drewstorys0 -
How to formulate keyword in language that has cases and foreign characters
Hello everybody, this is my first but foremost headache causing question that i can't seem to find answear to for a month already. I live in Lithuania - small eastern European country and my native language has all "fancy" things that one could probably immagine (tenses, cases, compound forms, foreign letters: ąčęėį..., genders, declensions etc.) The problem is: how to formulate keywords correctly for my SEO to get the best results? I'll try to explain my problem in detail by using few different cases on the same aspect: 1. If i'm using keyword in nominative case which is "atvirkštinis stogas" (reverse roof eng.) - i usually can't follow all of the recommendations for SEO: add keyword in topic, follow the keyword rate in text, because the same keyword will be repeated for numerous times but in many different forms because of the nature of language itself i.e. genitive case - "atvirkštiniam stogui", locative - "atvirkštiniame stoge". Even MOZ page analysis doesn't recognize these cases as the same keyword. How about Google? Searching for keywords in different cases also gives slightly different results - some websites drop by 5 - 7 places on google searchpage No.1. Possible solutions: a) Formulate all keywords in text by using only nominative case which would totaly limit writer to a first-former kid writting capabilities and result in nobody reading the text at all. b) Formulate keywords according to mostly used keyword in text, which would affect organic search because everybody is searching for keywords in nominative case. Note that everybody here in Lithuania usually use the nominative case in search window on google. 2. The use of foreign letters (ąčęėįšųž). If we use the same keyword "atvirkštinis stogas", we have only one letter "š" that is causing a problem.
Algorithm Updates | | StatybosMarketingas
In normal texts we use all of these letters, HOWEVER, nobody is ever writting these letters while searching for keyword in google, so normally they would search for "atvirkstinis stogas" with "s" instead of "š". If you search for these two keywords "atvirkštinis stogas" and "atvirkstinis stogas" you also get slightly different results. Possible solutions: 1. Use keyword with foreign letters and have perversed search results, because everybody will still search for keywords without them. 2. Use keyword without foreign letters which will affect SEO and tell me that I don't have any of my keywords in text, topic, url, etc. Any ideas on how to solve these puzzles? 🙂0 -
50% drop in search, no changes to site over 2 days, no notifications, A rank...
My URL is: http://applianceassistant.com
Algorithm Updates | | applianceassistant
With no changes to my site, I suddenly experienced a huge drop in search queries on Aug1. Your company has still given me an overall rating of A. I just thought you may be able to help or be interested in my case due to it's strange nature. Due to some suggestions on the webmaster forums, I have disavowed all low quality back links to the site, and I am currently working through each page trying to make the key words a little less spammy. Here are some screen shots of the action...
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-WgXUf-lvUyg/U-nrWNgspPI/AAAAAAAAAEI/imoI190LUns/s1600/Analytics_081214.tiff
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-srmvn288rr0/U-pxlwoycVI/AAAAAAAAAEg/ckmyX_2Sl_Y/s1600/PAGES_AUG.tiff
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-DVCYxhkutbQ/U-pxpQVfYfI/AAAAAAAAAEo/MN9PiLFT-zs/s1600/pages_july.tiff This appears to be almost a 50% 2 year set back. Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated0 -
How to determine the best keyword strategy/purpose for a blog in 2014?
Currently our blog has been used to add content to our site targeting desired keywords (fairly top-level). For example, if we wanted organic traffic for "Some City Contractors" (by no means a longtail), we would write a blog using this key term in the Title, url, a sub heading perhaps and a couple variations of the term throughout any subheadings or body copy. I think the idea was that since there was so much work to be done to get the static site pages optimized (rewriting that copy), we just decided to crank out fresh content targeting these high level KWs, assuming a search engine result is a result and as long as we got real estate there, a click and there was a link to the relevant site page in that article, we were golden (well, maybe not golden, but good). We are now building a new, responsive site and taking care to make sure that the site's relevant pages are nicely optimized. Higher level page are optimized for high-level KWs and sub pages target longer tail KWs identified in KW research. Along the way an SEO said it was bad that so many of our blogs were better optimized for key terms than the actual site pages (i.e. service pages, things you would find in the main nav.) This does make some sense to me so... So what is the new purpose for our blogs in this new age of Google and ever-increasing social influence? Should we forget about focusing on KWs already addressed within the site's core? Focus more on interesting, super long-tails that maybe don't have a ton of traffic, but are relevant (and oh by they way, something like 3 million terms are searched for the first time each day, right?)? Or forget the keywords, as long as the topic is relevant and interesting the real pay-off is in social interactions. I'm really interested to see if this results in clear-cut answer or more of a lengthy discussion...
Algorithm Updates | | vernonmack1 -
How does this site rank no 1 for big terms with no optimisation?
Hi, A client recently asked me abut a site that appears to have popped up out of nowhere and is ranking for big terms within their industry: http://bit.ly/11jcpky I have looked at the site for a particular term: Cheap Beds I was using unpersonalised search on google.co.uk with location set to London. The site currently ranks no 1 for that term and other similar terms. The question is how? SEO Moz reports no backlinks (they must have blocked?) Ahrefs and Majestic report report some backlinks but not many and no anchor text with the term in. The Page title and meta do not contain the term nor does the page seem to contain the term anywhere. The domain does have some age though has no keyword match in the URL. I'm a little stumped to how they are achieving these results. Any Ideas Anyone?
Algorithm Updates | | JeusuDigital0 -
Unable to increase the site traffic since 2 yrs
Hello friends, I am new to seomoz forum and this is my first query. Even i asked this query in many forums, i didnt get the right answer. it will be a big help if anyone answers my question. Since 2yrs i am doing seo for my site. even i am following all the white hat techniques and doing every submission manually. Still my site traffic is below 100 visits. Can any one help me to increase the site traffic? What are the techniques i need to follow to increase site visits? Also one of my sites recently got disappeared from google. I have checked all the pages listed in google for my site's major keywords. I didnt find the site anywhere. Can u hep me why this condition wll happen and what to do to overcome such issues?
Algorithm Updates | | Covantech0 -
Is there a utility that can tell me what keywords my site already ranks high for?
Ok... so I'm looking for a way to understand what my site already ranks high for.. I don't necessarily want to have to manually type in keywords. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate to a client what keywords they're already ranking high for. Is there an easy way / tool to go about doing this? Thanks in advance, Gene
Algorithm Updates | | BGroup0 -
Google said that low-quality pages on your site may affect rankings on other parts
One of my sites got hit pretty hard during the latest Google update. It lost about 30-40% of its US traffic and the future does not look bright considering that Google plans a worldwide roll-out. Problem is, my site is a six year old heavy linked, popular Wordpress blog. I do not know why the article believes that it is low quality. The only reason I came up with is the statement that low-quality pages on a site may affect other pages (think it was in the Wired article). If that is so, would you recommend blocking and de-indexing of Wordpress tag, archive and category pages from the Google index? Or would you suggest to wait a bit more before doing something that drastically. Or do you have another idea what I could to do? I invite you to take a look at the site www.ghacks.net
Algorithm Updates | | badabing0