Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your responses, Ryan and Alan.

Ryan's response included a comment about the number of clicks away from the home page. This makes me question my site architecture so I've asked a question about spatial location and site architecture.

Hi,

Based on the answers to my question about how to put the spatial location in the URL I'm now thinking about whether and how to flatten my information architecture.

My main content is trails and courses. For both categories I have most content for Vancouver, BC (over 100 trails). I have some trails from California and more trails from other areas in BC (5-20 trails for 3 separate counties).

My current site architecture is:

trails -> country -> state/province -> county/regional district -> list of trails.

So a trail page is 5 clicks away from the root.

My course structure is:

courses -> course list

(I have far fewer courses but need to start structuring them)

I did a search for site:example.com and found that my course pages rank most highly (probably because I have more inbound links for them) then I get workout pages then I get trail pages last of all.

I want to be set up to scale for the rest of the world but I think I have to start winning in my local area first.

What ideas might be good for a better site architecture?

I'm thinking of doing this:

trails -> location page -> list of trails for county.

The location page would be a single page with a tree hierarchy from country to county - nicely styled to help the user. Something like:

Canada

-> British Columbia

-> -> Greater Vancouver

-> -> Okanagan-Similikameen

-> -> Squamish-Lilloet

United States

-> California

-> -> Marin

I would make the urls be /trail/ca-bc-greater-vancouver/baden-powell-trail.

I'm considering whether /trails/ca-bc/ (i.e. to get the state) should return a list of the counties. I'm worried about duplicate content for doing this.

Curiously, my competitors don't have this structure at all. Access to their trails is by searching.

Thoughts?

Many thanks in advance

The SEOMoz On-Page report for my site brings up one warning (among others) that I find interesting:

• Minimal Subfolders in the URL

My site deals with trails and courses for both races and general running. The structure for a trail is, for example:

/trails/Canada/British-Columbia/Greater-Vancouver-Regional-District/Baden--Powell-Trail/trail/2

The structure for courses is:

/course/28

In both cases, the id at the end is used for a database lookup.

I'm considering an URL structure that would be:

/trail/Baden-Powell-Trail/ca-bc-vancouver

This would use the country code (CA) and sub-country code (BC) along with the short name for the region.

This could be good because:

• it puts the main keyword first

• the URL is much shorter

• there are only 3 levels in the URL structure

However, there is evidence, from Google's Matt Cutts, that the keyword order and URL structure don't matter in that way: See this post: http://www.seomoz.org/q/all-page-files-in-root-or-to-use-directories

If Matt Cutts says they aren't so important then why are they listed in the SEOMoz On-Page Report?

I'd prefer to use /trail/ca-bc-vancouver/Baden-Powell-Trail.

I'll probably do a similar thing for courses.

Is this a good idea? Thoughts?

Many thanks, in advance, for your help.

Cheers,

Edward

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