Is there something fundamentally wrong with our site architecture?
-
Hi everyone!
Could a few of you brilliant people take a look at the architecture of this site http://www.ccisolutions.com, and let me know if you see any obvious problems? I have run the site through XENU, and all of our most important pages, including categories and products, are no deeper than level 3. Everything deeper than that is, in most cases, an image, a pdf or an orphaned page (of which we have thousands).
Could having thousands upon thousands of orphaned pages be having a more hurtful effect on our rankings than our site architecture? I have made loud noises and suggested that duplicate content, site speed and dilution of page authority due to all those orphaned pages are some of the primary reasons we don't rank as well as we could. But, I think those suggestions just aren't sexy or dramatic enough, so there is much shaking of heads and discussion that it must be something fundamentally wrong with site architecture.
I know re-arranging the furniture is more fun than scrubbing the floors, but I think our problems are more about fundamental cleanup than moving things around
What do you think?
-
Thank you so much Peter. This is excellent advice and has dot fallen on deaf ears! As we move forward, not only with trying to make the current site better but also to redesign a site on a new platform that is easier for our customers to use, your advice is going to come in very handy. Thanks so much for taking the time to comment and advise!
Dana
-
Come back in two or three months after you remove the pages and let us know if anything happened.
-
Thanks again. Yes, we are definitely going to go for it. It makes complete sense.
-
If this was my site I would place that form under a tab.
If you get rid of the review/ratings page and the email to friend page that will decrease the size of your site by a lot of pages. That will give you a more compact site with a much higher content value per page.
If I dumped pages like these from one of my sites I would be hoping to see my rankings slowly climb a little higher.
I can't guarantee that... It is what I would do myself and what I would hope the result would be.
Good luck if you try it. I think that there is upside here and I think that the downside is about zero.
-
One final follow up question EGOL if you don't mind. We also have a link on all the product pages that goes to an "Email this Product to a Friend" request page on another URL. It's a very similar scenario as the "Rating/Review" request links. Are these causing a similar problem? I ask because if we are going to fix one we might as well fix the other at the same time. Let me know what you think.
Thanks as always!
-
Fascinating. It never ceases to amaze me that the better I get at SEO, the less I seem to know Thanks very much EGOL I very very much appreciate your explanation and help on this one!
-
My understanding is that pagerank flows into every link on a page. If the page has a nofollow link then the pagerank into that page is lost.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl0MBeKDXLY
These pages are not needed for the visitor either. One click less if the form is placed under the review/ratings tab that leads to them.
-
Thanks EGOL,
Is it evaporating pagerank simply because those pages exist as many separate pages with thin/duplicate content? Or would the "no follow" be evaporating pagerank? If so, how? I was under the impression that adding a "no follow" attribute retained the pagerank of the page on which the no followed link resides?
Thanks for any clarification you can provide. I am trying to get my ducks in a row before giving marching orders to our IT director.
Dana
-
That would evaporate a lot of pagerank.
I would place the form under a tab to reduce that loss.
-
Thanks EGOL,
I have spent some time discussing the "Review Request" page types that you referenced above with our IT director. Since we have these set as "disallow" in our robots.txt file, and it appears that none of these pages have been indexed, shouldn't we be able to accomplish what needs to be done by adding a "no follow" attribute to these pages?
-
Maybe do some re-architecting along with the cleanup.
I didn't walk thru the cart process but the site navigation at least has the look of something that's been patched and altered over time, for example: Main menu My Account and Login point to the same page so that kind of thing should be sorted, the navigation paths should be mapped and made simpler if possible.
The site could do with some copy editing. Might want to tighten up how everything is organized, and plan overall what pages are supposed to be ranking for what terms, the information seems spread around too much, it all seems a little scattered and in places a little verbose.
Here: https://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CLA.cat, we have a mis-used "About Us" page offering additional services descriptions instead of talking exclusively about the company.
Services overviews should be found only on their own focussed pages designed to rank for their terms.
About page should be about the company itself: who's in it, reason for being, history, function within the economy, corporate responsibility ideas, market(s) served. That kind of stuff.
My take just checking quickly.
-
If I had a site with thousands orphaned pages I would be attacking them with an ax in both hands. If they serve no purpose they would have been redirected the same day they were orphaned.
Google can have a really long memory for orphaned pages - years for some that I have seen. So if these pages are thin content, or duplicate content I think that they would be putting a drag on your site if they are not causing a Panda problem.
If possible, I would also be putting links in the pdf documents that point to the homepage or a more relevant page of the website. Then any linkjuice that flows into them from your site or from other sites is put to good use. For pdfs that you don't own and can't edit I would be looking for a way to provide the same information where linkjuice can flow back.
I would also be after those review form pages, getting rid of them for a form on the product page under a tab. Those pages are linkjuice sinks, trivial content, duplicate content. I would get rid of them ASAP.
Here is an example
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/product/ProductRatingRequest.jsp?product=ANH-GL2400-24
That's what I see in a quick look.
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
-
I am Using <noscript>in All Webpage and google not Crawl my site automatically any solution</noscript>
| |
Web Design | | ahtisham2018
| | <noscript></span></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=errorPages/content-blocked.jsp?reason=js"></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"><span class="html-tag"></noscript> | and Please tell me effect on seo or not1 -
I want to create a 301 redirect on a WordPress site, nothing's working...
Hello all, I'm hoping someone out there can give me a hand with this. I'm trying to modify my .htaccess file so that the site will go from maxcarnagemusic.com to www.maxcarnagemusic.com and also, so viewers will be redirected to www.maxcarnagemusic.com/home when they try to access the site. I've tried a few different things, including adding the 301 redirect plugin for Wordpress, but nothing seems to work. Can someone out there show/tell me how to create an htaccess file that will execute as much. I apologize in advance, my Apache experience is very, very limited. Thank you all in advance!
Web Design | | maxcarnage0 -
Manufacturer, New Direct-to-Consumer Site (Separate Site, or Sub-Domain?)
Hi All! Working with an established manufacturer, been around for many years, it's an internationally known brand, and their products are sold by thousands on distributors. They recently started a new website (separate from their old established B2B manufacturer site) which will be used to sell direct to customer. The new site is great, with a nice responsive design, clean look, flexible, etc. The problem is, it's a new site with low Domain Authority. The manufacturer's B2B site has been around a while, very high Domain Authority. So, I'd like to be able to harness all the link equity they've build instead of trying to optimize a brand new site. The problem with this old established site is that it IS in fact old. The design is terrible, it's not responsive, old code, bad look and feel, etc. We could incorporate the new B2C site (which has its own CMS) into a sub-domain, like store.site.com. But, I'd worry that site.com's crapiness will limit growth potential for the new pages at store.site.com. Same issue were we to add the new site into a sub-folder, like site.com/store/. On the other side, we could just keep the new site, with it's own domain, sitestore.com, and have product pages and/or category pages from the manufacturer's B2B site link to the relevant pages on the new B2C site. Thanks!
Web Design | | fiberglass0 -
URL Designing and Site Architecture
Hi, 1. At the end of the URL, should we have "/" or not (for e.g. my website www.example.com/abc/) 2. What is the optimum level of site depth 3. Google crawler will go through the breadcrumb or url (If a page is at 6th level through breadcrumb and at 4th level through URL, at which level will google crawler recognize this.
Web Design | | adiez12340 -
Should the parent directory of the main site-navigation be clickable or not?!?
Highly discussed in our team is the question: Should all parent navigation items be clickable, or only the ones that have no child menu appearing on mouse over? At Starwood Germany, we would like to adjust the main navigation for all our websites in order to improve consistency and user friendliness. At the moment, most of our websites feature both clickable non-clickable parent items, depending on whether the items have a corresponding child menu (appearing on mouse over) or not. See example here: http://www.imperialvienna.com/en Some of our team members believe it might be irritating and/or confusing for the user if some items are clickable while others are not. What do you think? Any thoughts and insights would be truly appreciated!
Web Design | | DFM_GSA0 -
Testing your code and site
I’ve got various WordPress websites with the Share This social plugin for WordPress. I have been using Firebug and http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso to do general checks on the site and the code. And used W3C validator too. Due to the way WordPress appears to work we never seem to be able to get all the firebug/ website optimization tests to pass and the W3C validator passes everything on HTML 5 apart from 7 errors with the Share This social plugin. How do you test your code/websites? Should I stop be a perfectionist and just be happy?
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0 -
Suggestions For My Ecommerce Site
I am starting to work on an ecommerce site that I am part owner of. My partner who is the other owner started the site a while back and because he has no internet marketing experience the site didn't come out very well. I am currently overhauling the site and here is a list of things first on my list so I can at least get started on some seo and even ppc. I would really appreciate it if you could take a look at our store and see if you think I am missing anything or you could suggest anything else that really should be done immediately or something that is wrong. The site is www.clubfitnesswarehouse.com Update magento to newest version Fix url structure to be SEO friendly for homepage, category pages, product pages etc. For an example of a site that has great seo friendly urls please refer to examples on http://www.bigfitness.com/ site. For example these pages. http://www.bigfitness.com/treadmillstore.html , http://www.bigfitness.com/bosplincy.html , Remove top navigation menu and instead create left sidebar navigation menu created to navigate site and products. For example of these types of sidebars please refer to sidebar on http://www.bigfitness.com/ or http://www.americanfitness.net/ We will NOT be using same structure as what is in top navigation currently. Categories and keywords of categories will be changed and some will stay the same structure as is currently in navigation For header we would like to feature our shipping policy, returns, privacy policy, no sales tax etc. For example I have seen that I like refer to http://www.spiderofficechairs.com/ Obviously we do not want to copy but something similar for our own site. All images on homepage must be changed to include clickable txt so google can read text not just pictures. We would also like product pages modified to make more user friendly and conversion increased. Add to cart button needs to be changed, text needs to be brighter instead of dull grey color. Add to cart button must also be moved ABOVE THE FOLD! Also on product pages we would like to add sections in addition to Product Description, of Specs, and About section for each product page. We also need the ability to change this information as needed when we need to.
Web Design | | PEnterprises0 -
What's the best was to structure Product page information on my site?
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4). One of the most critical components of the site is our product database. We don't actually sell anything directly - instead we monetize them by displaying relevant affiliate product feeds and price comparisons. However since the Panda update was implemented in February my traffic (particularly my long tail, product related traffic) has dropped off considerably. I had about a 20% drop in overall traffic, but have made up some of the ground in the past week. However I want to know once and for all how I should structure my product related information as I have a ton of great content that is ready to be published in this section but want to be sure I structure it the best possible way from a SEO standpoint. Here are a few different options I've come up with for displaying information about products on my site. For the purpose of these examples I am going to refer to all of the information that makes up my product pages collectively as "product profiles". Please let me know which is the best SEO wise (or if you have a better way of doing it let me know): - Option 1 - Current Method - Divide Content Sections into different pages / urls Example: http://tinyurl.com/4tpdlbl This is how the majority of my product profiles are currently structured. I did this to improve load times and to keep the total number of links per page down. In addition to the core product profile subpages: "Product Details","Compare Prices", **"**Product Review", "Hot Auctions", and "Checklists", I have the Checklists area further segmented by subset, each of which is on its own page that is only accessible through the main Checklists tab of the profile. - Option 2 - Everything on one url / page the old fashioned way, with everything available by scrolling vertically. This would make the page go on forever though. - Option 3 - Everything on one url / page, but visually segmented using css / javascript tabs. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4kqhauh I looked at the source code and all the page text is there, so it looks like it would be spider-able but you tell me. Or would another method of tabbing be better? My site is wordpress based so the functionality comes from a plugin. - Option 4 - Use post tabs that are technically all on the same page, but make each individual tab be accessible through its own suburl, all of which share the same core canonical url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4bs9pjs Clicking on any of the individual tabs will result in something like ?postTabs=2 being appended to the core url. Example: http://tinyurl.com/4gvgufc Any input would be greatly appreciated asap! Thanks Mike
Web Design | | MikeATL0