Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Rob,

Just throwing some ideas in here.

Is it folder depth or distance in terms of number of clicks from Homepage that makes a difference? It was my understanding that using a very flat structure was pretty outdated SEO?

One of the issues I think that get overlooked a lot when considering URL structure is how to structure URLs so you can drill down easily into different types of content/categories/channels.

As I understand it Google see a slash as the root of a folder. You can see this in Analytics, a page with a slash at the end of it has a folder icon next to it and you are shown the stats for that folder. This means that if you remove the trailing slashes from actual pages you can see how separate areas of the site are performing as a whole.

Another argument for using a folders to structuring URLs could be that "link juice" spreads throughout the folder, perhaps even contextually. For instance if I have a folder which contains all of my pages about widgets then as my link profile to the pages in the widgets folder all the pages in that folder benefit. It seems logical that if an item was in a relevant directory that x contextual links then it would benefit.

As I said, just a bit food for thought, not sure if my theories are correct but I'd be interested what you guys think?

Neil.

Hi Lu,

You're still showing 12,00+ indexed urls when I use the site: operator!

Have you seen a drop in traffic?

Are there any crawl errors showing in WMT?

Neil.

Hi Lu,

When you say "My page indexing has been falling steadily" what do you mean exactly?

Like you, I can see +12,000 pages indexed by Google. And if Webmaster Tools is telling you that you have 12,088 URLs indexed it all looks fine...

Neil.

Hi Gagan,

Google are generally more than happy for sites to test new pages, layouts and functionality. They even have some free tools for that purpose.

Content Experiments

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?ref_topic=1745207&rd=1

I'm not sure about the viability of of using Content Experiments to test a whole new site, but it would be worth looking into.

Let us know how you get on.

Neil.

Thanks Ruth.

Good to know I was on the right track.

How many links are on the page?

If the links are internal and there to help the users navigate then why not leave them as do follow? If there are so many links that you're concerned, it might be worth considering that there too many links, not just as far a Google is concerned but also form the users perpective.

Remember, using nofollow top sculpt Page Rank is against G's guidelines.

Very Helpful,

Thanks Mihal,

That's what I thought, after reading and watching Maile's video. Does this mean I've spotted a mistake by MOZ??

Neil.

By all means move the old content to a "archive" sub domain, but if you want to redirect to the new content you should ensure that the "archive" subdomain is set to noindex, nofllow. A 301 redirect is the best method to ensure indexing factors get passed to the new URL but should only be used if the old pages have been removed form the index, so as well as making the old pages noindex, nofllow make sure you use the URL removeal tool in WMT or update your sitemap.

"Also for the active events, is there any difference between:

_redirecting the old page to the archive page and then forwarding to the equivalent on the new page _

and

redirecting the old page directly to the new page"

What is best for user? Presumably the new pages have new content, if so you should redirect to them.

N

Hi All,

I'm looking to implement rel="next" & rel="prev", so I've been looking for examples. I looked at the source code for the MOZ.com forum, if anyone one is going to do it properly MOZ are.

I noticed that the rel="next" & rel="prev" tags have been implemented in the a href tags that link to the previous and next pages rather than in the head. I'm assuming this is fine with Google but in their documentation they state to put the tags in the . Does it matter?

Neil.

Hey Rob,

Just throwing some ideas in here.

Is it folder depth or distance in terms of number of clicks from Homepage that makes a difference? It was my understanding that using a very flat structure was pretty outdated SEO?

One of the issues I think that get overlooked a lot when considering URL structure is how to structure URLs so you can drill down easily into different types of content/categories/channels.

As I understand it Google see a slash as the root of a folder. You can see this in Analytics, a page with a slash at the end of it has a folder icon next to it and you are shown the stats for that folder. This means that if you remove the trailing slashes from actual pages you can see how separate areas of the site are performing as a whole.

Another argument for using a folders to structuring URLs could be that "link juice" spreads throughout the folder, perhaps even contextually. For instance if I have a folder which contains all of my pages about widgets then as my link profile to the pages in the widgets folder all the pages in that folder benefit. It seems logical that if an item was in a relevant directory that x contextual links then it would benefit.

As I said, just a bit food for thought, not sure if my theories are correct but I'd be interested what you guys think?

Neil.

By all means move the old content to a "archive" sub domain, but if you want to redirect to the new content you should ensure that the "archive" subdomain is set to noindex, nofllow. A 301 redirect is the best method to ensure indexing factors get passed to the new URL but should only be used if the old pages have been removed form the index, so as well as making the old pages noindex, nofllow make sure you use the URL removeal tool in WMT or update your sitemap.

"Also for the active events, is there any difference between:

_redirecting the old page to the archive page and then forwarding to the equivalent on the new page _

and

redirecting the old page directly to the new page"

What is best for user? Presumably the new pages have new content, if so you should redirect to them.

N