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
-
How to optimize WordPress Pages with Duplicate Page Content?
I found the non WWW ans WWW duplicate pages URL only, more than thousand pages.
On-Page Optimization | | eigital0 -
On Page Optimization Report
Does this tool also guard against an instance of over-optimization or keyword-spamming?
On-Page Optimization | | webfeatus0 -
How much SEO value does a fashion site get from bolting text onto the bottom of home page? Does the value compensate for cluttering up a page focused on an iconic image?
Getting ready to launch a completely redesigned site for a fashion designer. Since it is a fashion site, visitors do not need text to describe what the site is about., We are weighing three options: 1) clean design with no text (just images and navigational links), 2) bolting on a couple of sentences of text at the bottom of the page to signal keyword terms to the search engines, 3) following the lead of the top ranking site in the category and adding lots of text to the bottom of the page. Do the SEO benefits justify cluttering up the design by bolting text onto the bottom of the home page, and if so, how many characters of text seem to be the minimum to be effective?
On-Page Optimization | | RandyP0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hi All, New to SEOMoz, so thanks in advance for any answers! Looking at our Crawl Diagnostics and "Too Many On-Page Links" is first on the list. The site was build with the intention of users being able to quickly get to where they want to go with drop down menus (sub nav), so we built the navigation using bullet points/css. Yes, agreed there are too many links on each page from our navigation, main nav cats are 4 with sub nav about 40, but what is the best way to resolve the problem other then removing most of the links (from the sub nav drop down)? Could we just use the attribute rel=nofollow for the sub nav links? TIA
On-Page Optimization | | bmmedia0 -
Brand keyword is on every page
Suppose a website is devoted to a selling a modest number of products that are sold under one brand name. For example, the site might have product pages for Chevy Camaro, Chevy Suburban, and Chevy Volt, and many other pages related to Chevy. Chevy is in the domain name and on virtually every page. Competitors are also selling Chevy's and you want to rank well on the keyword "Chevy". One SEO rule is limit a keyword to one optimized page, and if it appears on other pages, minimize the use of the keyword on other pages, and pass links to the optimized page. However, it can be really challenging to write prose without using the brand name, particularly if the brand name is of the form "brand training method" or "brand learning center". The other pages can't say "training method" or "learning center". They need to say "brand training method", etc. What are the tactics to rank for a brand name when it appears on virtually every page? Best,
On-Page Optimization | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
I am optimizing my webpages according to suggestions from the On Page Report Card. Should I have more than one keyword for a page?
I am optimizing my webpages according to suggestions from the On Page Report Card. Should I have more than one keyword for a page or should I make separate pages for each keyword even when they are similar? Will Google penalize me for making similar pages? Imagine selling, bargain milk chocolate peanut clusters. Keywords examples could be: Bargain chocolate Bargain milk chocolate Bargain milk chocolate peanut clusters Bargain chocolate peanut clusters Chocolate peanut cluster bargains Milk chocolate peanut cluster bargains Etc. Will one page called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolatepeanutclusters.com be OK or should I have one called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolate.com and one called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolatepeanutclusters.com and one called http://mycompany/chocolatepeanutclusterbargains.com , etc.? Thanks for your advice.
On-Page Optimization | | KSHAYY0 -
Too many on page links
Our home page (and 1400 of our other pages) have well over 100 links, going beyond the recommend amount. Our competitors have less on page links (to other pages on their site) and way more link popularity so we are trying to figure out the best solution for this without hurting our sites conversions and usbaility.
On-Page Optimization | | iAnalyst.com0