Regarding Flat site structure and how much flat ?

[priyabharat]

Is it nice to place all commercial landing pages ( product pages) just below the root domain though their number would be around 50k ?

Many eCommerce sites does this so that the root domain link juice flow directly to the product page. What's your say on this ?

[DonnaDuncan]

If you're saying you'd put some (not all), of your most profitable product pages directly below the root domain (in the first folder) then I can see how that would work. But if you're talking about putting all 50,000 product pages directly below the root, no. That would distribute your link juice too broadly and confuse visitors and search engines.

Seems to me (and I could certainly be wrong), only big, established and recognized brands go the route you're suggesting.

[priyabharat]

Thanks Mr.Patrick and Ms.Donna for your suggestions which are very true with respect to SEO perspective.

But, Please understand my situation.

Let say I have 10 folders below root domain. So, all folders with get 10% of root domain rank juice. In case all my profitable pages (50k) are in 1st folder, all those pages will get 10/50k juice value.

If I put those pages directly below root domain, I will get 100/50k+x juice value from the root domain. ( x=9 other folders)

That means I am going to get 10 times more juice value to all my profitable pages in second case. That's what my competitors are doing. In case I don't, I will loose that opportunity.

[DonnaDuncan]

If you were writing a will and had an estate worth $50,000, would you rather leave $1 to each of your closest friends and relatives or a much larger sum to a select few? The first scenario is basically what you're doing with your SEO equity now.

i agree with Patrick. Try to find a logical and meaningful categorization of your products that will make it easier for Google and visitors to navigate your site and understand your priorities.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Ideally, you should have your products categorized in a logical hierarchy so that crawlers can better understand your site.

I recommend you take a look at these resources:
Information Architecture for SEO
Internal Links
Site Architecture & Search Engine Success Factors

It really comes down to understanding your users and providing a clean navigation that's easy to follow and understand, and not too deep. You want the products to be as close to the homepage (click wise) as possible, but you also want it to be categorized logically and relevantly.

Do you think out of those 50,000 products that you could find a logical category structure? Or do multiple products fall into multiple categories?

Let me know - hope this helps! Good luck!