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How can I figure out which pages are on the same level on my site ?

I created an automatic sitemap with a software online but it doesn't tell me abc page is on the 1 st level,  xyz page is on the second level etc... and I have a hard time figuring out if my main menu is on the same level as my drop down menu as it is visible on the same page.

Is there anyway to figure what which pages are on the same level ?

Is it useful for SEO to cross link between TOP level categories, let's say I have a Home page and then 2 sub categories, one about green widgets one about red widgets
Should i create a link from the green widget to the red widget or should I leave those are separate silos ?

I know that within a silo i need to cross link ( from green widget 1 to green widget 2 etc... )  but how about about from the main category to the other main category ?

Is it necessary to do internal links between the same categories of a website ( Let's say Ihave a category about shoes and in the category I have a page about boots and one about sandals ( should the page boots be accessible from the page sandals and the other way round or is the back button going back to the section shoes enough ) ?

If internal links between the same category ( sandals to boots ) are needed/recommended is it also a good practice to do site wide links between categories ( shoes and and bags for example )

Because by reading google recommendations "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link" I am not sure if they are talking about breadcrumbs or text links i am kind of lost ...

Thank you,

Hello,

I was reading this article about website architecture http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo and I have a question about site wide link...

I don't think site wide link are good if you want your homepage to have the most " juice " can someone confirm that to me.

What I mean by site wide link is let's say I have  a page about golf in califorina and I create a link to another page of my website which is about  golf in florida  that a good practicee to do that or not ?

I just used this calculator http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php and and if I do site wide links the juice doesn't go to my most important page ( the homepage ) which is the one I currently want to have the most juice.

However, I noticed that website like amazon do site wide link let's say you are looking at a book and they have lots of links for other books or categories and they still rank very well for the word "textbooks" so I am kind of lost and don't understand why they still rank even though to me their juice goes away by doing site wide links to other books or categories ( even though it is related )

Can someone tell me more about site wide links are they good , bad etc... and is this calculator I use right or wrong ?

Thank you

Google in it guideline recommends to create a sitemap.

Do they means a /sitemap.xml or does it need to be sitemap directly on the website ?

Does it make any difference ?

Thank you,

Google recommends to have static links it in guidelines

Are breadcrumbs and static text link the same ? or in addition to breadcrumbs do I need static links on my page going from page A to B etc...

The issue I have with static links this way is that if I look at the PR paper that would decrease the juice of my homepage ( which is the page I want to give the most juice to )

Thx,

I agree and i don't agree the reason being and is that many months ago I did a internal linking structure change ( without changing anything else ) on my site and my ranking skyrocketed  !!

I then reverted that changed to make the structure even better and since then I have never recovered that ranking , I even reverted to my old ranking...

It is the reason why I believe the issue doesn't come from onepage factors, I just think it is just a matter of when google is going to decide to get the data live ... ( and I guess i was luck enough to do my change last time when they pushed that data live .. )

and according to me they are very slow ... and try to make everything very confusing ... but I think the key to ranking once you have figured " everything out " is to wait and wait and wait...

I have checked everything and tried all the on page factors and I can guarantee they are all good.

The only thing that wrong was a re-direct from my subpages to my homepage ( I just changed that a week ago and I am waiting to see if it will change anything in terms of ranking). Do you think it will ?

So far I saw a change for my homepage on a highly competitive keyword ( in 6 days I went from page 9 to page 6 ) but not my subpages and I am wondering if it will go any further in the next few weeks of if i will be stuck there until google does its " FULL UPDATE ".

I agree thank you.

However, does it seem bizarre or normal to you that a site ranking hasn't changed even 6 months after its structure has been redone.

I understand now, what you meant is that they don't push all the data live at once ? is that correct ?

Google crawls everything when they crawl a site. However how many pages they crawl each day is a different story.

Google then ranks a site according to external and internal structure.. external is done "live", internal is calculated fairely quickly ( at least I think ) but " Pushed live " very rarely...

Has anyone any information on that ( time frame )

I am probably asking a question that only someone working for google can answer... but i am still giving it a try in case someone had luck and can answer this multi-million dollar question

How often does google update the internal linking structure of a website ?

Thank you,

That is what I thought but how do I redirect those knowing that they don't exist on my joomla website anymore ?

Thank you and is blocking javascript bad ? ( I was thinking about submenus )

I use joomla and I have blocked the following in my robots.txt is there anything that is bad for seo ?

User-agent: *

Disallow: /administrator/

Disallow: /cache/

Disallow: /components/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /includes/

Disallow: /installation/

Disallow: /language/

Disallow: /libraries/

Disallow: /media/

Disallow: /modules/

Disallow: /plugins/

Disallow: /templates/

Disallow: /tmp/

Disallow: /xmlrpc/

Disallow: /mailto:myemail@myemail.com/

Disallow: /javascript:void(0)

Disallow: /.pdf

I have redesigned my website with new web address over 6 months ago and in the google webmaster tools it still shows my old urls with a reponse code 404 and still crawls those pages.

How do I make sure they don't appear anymore in the webmaster tool and don't get crawled anymore ?

or should I do a re-direct ?

Thank you,

I was wondering if a 301 redirect will improve my ranking.

My subpages use to redirect to my homepage ( all the subpages of my site redirecting to my homepage) and my homepage use to have no redirect from non www.to www. ( other than thru google webmaster tools. I am sure why it was like this for my subpages...

I was wondering if I can expect some improvements in ranking now that the redirect goes from the none www. to the www version of each subpage and not to the homepage.

By the way what was the issue ( was I telling google ) by re-directing all my subpages to the homepage ? was I making google think that my subpages and my homepage were all the same ? was I sending all the link juice from the subpages to my homepage ? etc...

Thank you,

I just did a test typing my company name followed by what I sell
Let's say  "company green widgets "

I noticed that my webpage ( which is a subpage ) doesn't appear 1 st on google when i type that keyword....

Either some website that talks about my product appears or my homepage appears.

Why is that ?

Could it be a canonicalization issue ?

Thank you,

Thank you but which page might be viewed as duplicate content , the homepage or the subpage ?

is there a way for me to know if it is viewed as duplicate content by google ?

One last thing :

I also noticed that on our website we have webpages like this one

http://www.mywebsite.com/new/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=37

that are still accessible even though our real page is ranked in google is :

www.mywebsite.com/mywidget.html

Is that an issue ?

Thank you,

yes it does but what is the potential issue ?

Thanks George for your reply.

If it is not causing a duplicate content issue couldn't it be causing a SEO issue where google sees

www.mywebsite.com/my-sub/page.html  and mywebsite.com/my-sub/page.html as 2 different pages ?

Thank you,

I was looking at the subpages of my website www.mywebsite.com/my-sub/page.html and i noticed that when I type mywebsite.com/my-sub/page.html  ( without the www.) in front it I get re-directed to the homepage.

Is that a known issue of joomla and does it mean that google cache both version of my site causing site wide duplicate content ?

Thank you,

That is what I though. However, is the on page optimization only valuable for long tail key phrases that are not requested very often ?

I was looking at which websites ranks in the TOP 3 for the keyword "computers"...

I noticed that first is wikipedia and then there are Dell and Apple...

I then did an on page report card and I noticed that wikipedia has a grade A (which is great )

However, Apple has an F ( which sucks !! ) but there still rank out there.

My question is why is Apple ranking for the keyword computers with no tiitle, no URL, no H1, no body, no B/Strong... when wikipedia has all of that and the term " computers " occurs 290 times on its page...

Is is due to the fact that apple has millions of external links and is that enough to rank even with an " irrelevant " page ?

By the way I have noticed that on other keywords such as " bicycle ".

Wikipedia is ranking 1 st and then sites like www.trekbikes.com are out there but they shouldn't based on their homepage "optimization ".

I know there are other factors but I am just trying to figure why such sites ( like apple or trek bikes ) rank out there.

Thank you,