Page Hierarchy Question
-
I understand the basic concept of page hierarchy, i.e. parent and child pages.
My question is: Should the home page be the parent of all 2nd-level pages? Can/should there only be one top-level page, the home page?
In other words, is this:
site.com/homesite.com/home/products site.com/home/products/widgetsite.com/home/aboutsite.com/home/contactbetter than this:site.com/homesite.com/products site.com/products/widgetsite.com/aboutsite.com/contactThanks for your opinion!
-
Very good point Kris
-
All excellent answers. my only tip, make sure your URLs are short, tight, and clean!
-
I believe that the folders that your pages are placed in are less important than the linkage of your website.
Folders are the structure used to organize files on a server.
Linkage is how a website's structure is presented to the visitor and to Google. Linkage includes your persistent navigation, breadcrumbs, and the in-content links that you are publishing to visitors. It can also include link inputs from other websites. This is the structure that Google uses to discover how linkjuice and visitors flow through your website. Then they will use that information to decide which pages and parts of your website are really important.
Files in the same folder can have dramatic differences in importance on the basis of linkvalue, visitor useage, and traffic entry. They can also have very different power inputs produced by links into them from other websites. Files deep in folder structures can have higher PA than your homepage, files deep in your folder structure of your website can get more traffic than your homepage.
It is not unusual for a website to have third-level (and deeper) pages that get 10x as much traffic as the homepage. These are pages that have gained visibility in high volume SERPs or have gained visibility across an enormous number of queries.
Its possible that 90% of visitors never see the homepage. Instead they land on a deep page and are routed through the site by effective navigation, breadcrumbs, on-site search and in-content links.
Wikipedia is an example of a website where folder structure is meaningless and enormous traffic and linkvalue flows through in-content links. Amazon is a site where folder structure is meaningless and enormous traffic and linkvalue flows through dynamic persistent navigation, dynamic breadcrumbs, product recommendations and powerful on-site search.
Consider how your site can best serve the visitor. Decide how you can modify that to make the site best-serve your business goals. There is where you should spend significant thought and time.
-
ANSWER Yes, your home page will be the parent of all 2nd-level pages and any other page no matter the level
Your site needs a certain structure. Otherwise, it’ll just be a collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need the structure to navigate through your site, to click from one page to the other. And Google uses the structure of your site in order to determine what content is important and what content is less important
Structuring your website is crucial for both usability and findability. A lot of sites lack a decent structure to guide visitors to the product they’re looking for. Apart from that, having a clear site structure leads to better understanding of your site by Google
The structure of your site should be like a pyramid. On the top of the pyramid is your homepage, and underneath the homepage a number of category pages. For larger sites, you should make subcategories or custom taxonomies (more on that later). Within the categories and subcategories, you will have a number of blog posts, pages or product pages.
If you’ve not yet divided the blog posts or product pages on your site into a number of categories, you should definitely do so Make sure to add these categories to the main menu of your site.
Your linking structure is of great importance. Each page in the top of a pyramid should link to its subpages. And vice versa, all the subpages should link back to the pages on top of the pyramid.
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
-
Building a new page: What on-page SEO would you build in?
Hi all, Building a new page for a fairly competitive keyword. Need to make sure the on-page SEO is pretty top notch, because link building (including internal links) will be difficult. I've optimised the meta description, the alt tags and image names, and included the keyword in the Title Tags. Not a great deal I can do with regards to optimising for mobile or considering migrating to the AMP project because this is handled externally. What else would you suggest? Cheers in advance, Rhys
On-Page Optimization | | SwanseaMedicine1 -
On-Page Optimization Question
My company sells Blue widgets and we are located in Denver, CO. Keyword research indicates that the the highest volume phrase is "blue widgets for sale in denver co". Should my meta title tag be: Blue Widgets for sale in Denver CO , and my h1 tag be the same? or should they be semantic phrases? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | FicklingCompany0 -
Renamed a page and created a 301, page lost its rankings.
We changed a page name to fall under the root of our site from domain.com/page1/page301d/ to domain.com/page301d/ and after 2 weeks it still is not back to its #3 position. Now it is on the bottom of page 3. I cant figure out what im doing wrong here. The original .com/page1/ that this page fell under was removed totally and redirected to antoher page that was more relevant. I went ahead and re-enabled this page and its contnent, because the page was linking out to the page we 301d. This page we re-enabled had about 150 links poitning to it and therefore i was thinking that maybe the link juice from this page (or relevancy) via an internal link was helping it rank. This was updated about 6 days ago and the internal link is back Any other ideas why this might not be working. Ive checked all the 301s, content has not changed on the page. We have updated the strcuture for many pages. Instead of having the pages in question fall under anotehr page, they all fall under the root and its sub content is now only 2 levels deep , instead of being 3. hope that makese sense.
On-Page Optimization | | waqid0 -
Pages with near duplicate content
Hi Mozzers, I need your opinion on the following. Imagine that we have a product X (brand Sony for example), so if we sell parts for different models of items of this product X, we then have numerous product pages with model number. Sony camera parts for Sony Camera XYZ parts for Sony Camera XY etc. So the thing is that these pages are very very similar, like 90% duplicate and they do duplicate pages for Panasonic, Canon let's say with small tweaks in content. I know that those are duplicates and I would experiment removing a category for one brand only (least seached for), but at the same time I cannot remove for the rest as they convert a lot, being close to the search query of the customer (customer looks for parts for Sony XYZ, lands on the page and buys, insteading of staying on a page for Sony parts where should additionally browse for model number). What would you advise to make as unique as possible these pages, I am thinking about: change page titles. meta descriptions tweak the content as much as I can (very difficult, there is nothing fancy or different in those :(() i will start with top top pages that really drive traffic first and see how it goes. I will remove least visited pages and prominently put the model number in Sony parts page to see how it goes in terms of organic and most importantly conversions Any other ideas? I am really concerned about dupes and a penalty, but I try to think of solutions in order not to kill conversions at this point. Have a lovely Monday
On-Page Optimization | | SammyT0 -
Page 2 is ranking
Hey All, I'm working on a wordpress site project and in analytics the sites ranking url is page 2. is this a problem?
On-Page Optimization | | CobraJones950 -
Wrong Page is Ranking
My client is an Ecommerce reseller of a few major scooter brands. We currently rank fifth for a particular brand name but our main brand page isn't the one that ranks. Instead, it's a product page. The main brand page has an A rating from Moz for the desired keyword phrases. Neither page has any backlinks. Any ideas on why our main brand page would be outranked by a product page? What could we do to change this?
On-Page Optimization | | TrinShin0 -
"City page" links in footer of home page: Spammy?
Is listing a bunch of links to city pages in the footer of a home page considered "spammy" to Google? (ie- Chicago Alarms, Illinois Alarms, Naperville Alarms, etc.) What are the negative affects this might have on ranking, if any?
On-Page Optimization | | MChi0 -
Page speed tools
Working on reducing page load time, since that is one of the ranking factors that Google uses. I've been using Page Speed FireFox plugin (requires FireBug), which is free. Pretty happy with it but wondering if others have pointers to good tools for this task. Thanks...
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0