If a the site doesn't have a true folder structure, does having subdirectories really help with hierarchy and passage of equity?
-
If a website doesn't have a true folder structure, how much does have the page path structured like
/shoes/rain-boots/ actually help establish hierarchy and flow of equity?
Since /rain-boots/ doesn't actually live in the /shoes/ folder?Will you simply have to use internal linking to get the same effect for the search engine?
-
Yes. Link equity or PageRank is passed from page to page via the crawlable links on your site.
-
Thank you for your reply! That makes sense.
Is this true of equity as well?
-
It's all about the linking structure anyway. Google doesn't actually know that /rain-boots/ doesn't actually live in the /shoes/folder. It's bots don't get inside your CMS to see where every page resides. It just crawls your pages through the links within your site.
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
-
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
Site structure for location + services pages
We are in the process of restructuring our site and are trying to figure out Google's preference for location pages and services. Let's say we are an auto repair company with lots of locations and each one of them offer some unique services, while other services are offered by all or most other locations. Should we have a global page for each service live with a link to the location page for each shop that offers that service? OR Should we built a unique page about each service for every location as a subfolder of each location (essentially creating a LOT of sub pages because each location has 15-20 services. Which will rank better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Multilingual SEO subdirectories structure
Hi, I have to optimize a domain for Google for 3 languages (.com with subdirectories)(Dutch, German and English) content is only served on domain.com/nl, .com/de and .com/en NO CONTENT is served on domain.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bmcinternetmarketing
How do I exclude domain.com from getting in Google? Because there is no content on the top level only on subdirectories. Is there a rule we have to add to htaccess? Or Robots.txt by disallow all and next lines allow /nl, allow /de and allow /en? Thanks a lot! Kind regards, Alain Nijholt0 -
Why Google isn't indexing my images?
Hello, on my fairly new website Worthminer.com I am noticing that Google is not indexing images from my sitemap. Already 560 images submitted and Google indexed only 3 of them. Altough there is more images indexed they are not indexing any new images, and I have no idea why. Posts, categories and other urls are indexing just fine, but images not. I am using Wordpress and for sitemaps Wordpress SEO by yoast. Am I missing something here? Why Google won't index my images? Thanks, I appreciate any help, David xv1GtwK.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Worthminer1 -
Best practices for structuring an ecommerce site
I'm revamping my wife's ecommerce site. It is currently a very low traffic website that is not indexed very well in Google. So, my plan is to restructure it based upon the best practices that helps me avoid duplicate content penalties, and easier to index strategies. The store has about 7 types of products. Each product has approximately 30 different size variations that are sometimes specifically searched for. For example: 20x10x1 air filters, 20x10x2 air filters, 20x10x1 allergy reducing air filters, etc So, is it best for me to create 7 different products with 30 different size variations (size selector at the product level that changes the price) or is it better to create 210 different product pages, one for each style/size?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pherbio0 -
Site was moved, but still exists on the old server and is being outranked for it's own name
Recently, a client went through a split with a business partner, they both had websites on the same domain, but within their own sub directories. There is a main landing page, which links to both sites, the landing page sits on the root. Ie. example.com is a landing page with links to example.com/partner1, and example.com/partner2 Parter 2 will be my client for this example. After the split, partner 2 downloaded his website, and put it up on his own server, but no longer has any kind of access to the old servers ftp, and partner 1 is refusing to cooperate in any way to have the site removed from the old server. They did add a 301 redirect for the home page on the old server for partner 2, so, example.com/partner2/index.html is 301'ing to the new site on the new server, HOWEVER, every other page is still live on that old server, and is outranking the new site in every instance. The home page is also being outranked, even with the 301 redirect in place. What are some steps I can take to rectify this? The clients main concern is that this old website, containing the old partners name, is outranking him for his own name, and the name of his practice. So far, here's what i've been thinking: Since the site has poor on-page optimization, i'll start be cleaning all of that up. I'll then optimize the home page to better depict the clients name and practice through proper usage of heading tags, titles, alt, etc, as well as the meta title and description. The only other thing I can think of would be to start building some backlinks? Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
I don't get it... A Grade, etc
I have an A grade for a specific keyword, my competitors ranked above me have poor grades.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerwp
My "Root Domains Linking to the Page" is higher than competitors ranked above me.
Yet I'm ranked 7th on google.
Even worse the 3rd place ranked URL has very poor page authority and linking. What is giving these poor sites such great rankings? Jxluy8Z.png0 -
Why are our sites top landing pages URL's that no longer exist and retrun 404 errors?
Digging through analytics today an noticed that our sites top landing pages are for pages that were part of the old www.towelsrus.co.uk website taken down almost 12 months ago. All these pages had the 301 re-directs which were removed a few months back but still have not dropped out of Googles crawl error logs. I can't understand why this is happening but almost certainly the bounce rate on these pages (100%) mean we are loosing potential conversions. How can I identify what keywords and links people are using to land on these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0