Help needed for a 53 Page Internal Website Structure & Internal Linking
-
Hey all...
I'm designing the structure for a website that has 53 pages. Can you take a look at the attached diagram and see if the website structure is ok?
On the attached diagram I have numbered the pages from 1 to 53, with 1 being the most important home page - 2,3,4,5, being the next 4 important pages - 6,7,8... 15,16,17 being the 3rd set of important pages, and 18,19,20..... 51,52,53 being the last set of pages which are the easiest to rank.
I have two questions:
- Is the website structure for this correct? I have made sure that all pages on the website are reachable.
- Considering the home page, and page number 2,3,4,5 are the most important pages - I am linking out to these pages from the the last set of pages (18,29,20...51,52,53). There are 36 pages in the last set - and out of this 36, from 24 of them I am linking back to home page and page number 2,3,4,5. The remaining 8 pages of the 36 will link back to pages 6,7,8...15,16,17.
In total the most importnat page will have the following number of internal incoming links:
Home Page : 25
Pages 2,3,4,5 : 25
Pages 6,7,8...15,16,17 : 4
Pages 18,19,20...51,52,53 : 1
Is this ok considering home page, and pages 2,3,4,5 are the most important? Or do you think I should divide and give more internal links to the other pages also?
If you can share any inputs or suggestions to how I can improve this it will greatly help me. Also if you know any references for good guides to internal linking of websites greater that 50 pages please share them in the answers.
Thank you all!
Regards,
P.S - The URL for the image is at http://imgur.com/XqaK4
-
Flat site architecture shows that any directory one step from the root shows extreme importance; so essentially you can link to any inner page in any other directories.
For example: USA
Jacksonville Atlanta Mississippi New York Los Angeles Ohio Las Vegas
As you can see in this model, this is natural. But it shows the flat site architecture I was referring to. Any of the cities show great value to the home page. You want to include any unique data in these directories. Essentially any file can be made important, so you don't have to worry about specific keywords you want to rank for not have an equal opportunity. You don't have to worry about one folder on your server having more importance over another.
You can Google "flat architecture"
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/a-flat-architecture-in-practice
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture
You can certainly should focus on your content algorithm and start planning your linking building profile.
-
Thanks Chad... Good tip regarding passing up link juice by creating valuable stuff in the deep pages. Shall follow that.. You've answered my question, but I have one more doubt regarding natural inner pages. Is it better to have a natural flow .. As in. Home page - country specific pages - city specific pages - shops in the cities Or Home page - important country & city pages & shops - less important country & city pages - shops. If I use the first option, which is more natural I can clearly show the path to each page. If I use the second option, it's not natural- but the important pages are closer to the home page. Another option is to have the natural flow but to also link out to important pages where appropriate from top level pages. I know this is a little vague, but I hope you've got my doubt.., would love to hear your thoughts on this .. Thanks.
-
I took a look at your screenshot; but a few things first.
Proper silo-site is an ongoing process. The most important thing is to ensure that you have natural inner pages and link them to each top-level-directory (one directory away from the root). You can certainly tie your pages in each inner directory by linking from the main inner directory.
As you syndicate your unique pages in unique directories (again one directory from the root) you can pass great link juice throughout your website's skeleton, leading to better home page rank.
Whitehat SEO includes a very deep inter-linking structure. To get a feel for this checkout Wikipedia. They are the best at placing links to relevant or similar content above the fold and naturally linked to other directories within their framework.
To answers your question direct:
Inner link as much as you can to other files and from top-level-directories to files within it's directory. Only when it is natural include an anchor to other files for further reading.
The deeper a page can link to a higher level directory the better.
*For off-site SEO, getting links to the deep pages is going to be key to help pass up the link juice. Try sampling your content on different websites and getting a link back to page in the process. You can create pdf, info-graphics, or technical content with these deep pages and it will do wonders for your website.
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
-
What Are Internal Linking Best Practices For Blogs?
We have a blog for our e-commerce site. We are posting about 4-5 blog posts a month, most of them 1500+ words. Within the content, we have around 10-20 links pointing out to other blog posts or products/categories on our site. Except for the products/categories, the links use non-optimized generic anchor text (i.e guide, sizing tips, planning resource). Are there any issues or problems as far as SEO with this practice? Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Internal link from blog content to commercial pages risks?
Hi guys, Has anyone seen cases where a site has been impacted negatively from internal linking from blog content to commercial based pages (e.g. category pages). Anchor text is natural and the links improve user experience (i.e it makes sense to add them, they're not forced). Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
HTTPS website migration and internal links
Hey Moz! I read Moz's guide on migrating websites from http to https, and it seems changing all relative internal links to absolute https is recommended (we currently use relative internal links). But is doing this absolutely necessary if we will already have a redirect in our .htaccess file forcing all http pages to https? Changing all of our internal links to absolute https will be very time consuming, and I'd like to hear your thoughts as to whether it's absolutely recommended/necessary; and if so, why? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Internal Links - Dofollow or Nofollow and why?
Hey there Mozzers, I am a question about internal links. If I am writing a article about something and want to link to another one of my articles inside my blog, do i have to make that link nofollow or dofollow? If possible tell me why also. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
International SEO Domain Structure
Hi Guys, I am wondering if anybody can point me to a recent trusted report or study on international domain name structure and SEO considerations. I am looking to read up on the SEO considerations and recommendations for the different domain structures in particular using sub-directories i.e. domain.com/uk, domain.com/fr. Kind regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeAreContinuum
Cian1 -
Need help creating sitemap
Hello, The details of my question is sitemap related. Below is the background info: we are ecommerce site with around 4000 pages, and 20000 images. we dont have a sitemap implemented on our site yet. i have checked alot of sitemap tools out there, like g-sitecrawler, xml sitemap, a1 sitemap builder etc, and i tried to create sitemaps via them, but all them give different results. the major links are all there, but the results start to vary for level 2, level 3 links and so on. plus no matter how much i read up on sitemaps, the more i am getting confused. i read lots of seomoz articles on sitemaps, and due to my limited seo and technical knowledge, the extra information on these articles gets more confusing. i also just read an article on seomoz that instead of having one sitemap, having multiple smaller sitemaps is very good idea, specially if we are adding lots of new products (which we are). Now my question: My question is having understood the immense value of sitemap (and by having it very poorly implemented before), how can i make sure that i get a very good sitemap (both xml and html sitemap). i do not want to do something again and just repeat old mistakes by having a poorly implemented sitemap for our site. I am hoping that one of the professionals out there, can help me also make and implement the sitemap. If you can please point me to the right direction.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kannu10 -
Help needed for a domain
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodrigofreitas0 -
Do Banner Ads Help In Link Building?
We have been contacting some webmasters for building links, but a lot of them will only do banner ads on there site. Is having a keyword rich alt tag on the banner ad and a do follow link to our site just as good? Would like to hear your thoughts and l experiences in trying to leverage these banner ads to help in seo ranking. Thank you in advance for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anchorwave0