Architecture questions.
-
I have two architecture related questions.
-
Fewer folders is better. For example, www.site.com/product should rank better than www.site.com/foldera/folderb/product, all else constant. However, to what extreme does it make sense to remove folders? With a small site of 100 or so pages, why not put all files in the main directory? You'd have to manually build the navigation versus tying navigation to folder structure, but would the benefit justify the additional effort on a small site?
-
I see a lot of sites with expansive footer menus on the home page and sometimes on every page. I can see how that would help indexing and user experience by making every page a click or two apart. However, what does that do to the flow of link juice? Does Google degrade the value of internal footer links like they do external footer links? If Google does degrade internal footer links, then having a bunch of footer links would waste link juice by sending a large portion of juice through degraded links, wouldn't it?
Thank you in advance,
-Derek
-
-
Hi James,
It sounds like when you consolidated widgets, you gave Google more of a focused page for persons to search for vs a larger number of pages on the same product. This is interesting as it is the inverse of the long tail effect. You would think that more pages around a given product would be better. I guess this would be a search case where too many pages was a bad thing. Makes me think of how we setup pagination to make sure Google does not focus on p 2,3,4,5 etc but work the noindexes to have focus on page 1 of the pagination.
Thanks for the post!
-
Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?
Thanks!
-
Thanks, I've noticed the site: www issue that you mention, but I'm coming around to the idea that it's a result of other factors, not the length of the url itself.
Do you think Google degrades internal footer links? Here is my concern illustrated in an example:
Image a home page with "40 points" of link juice to pass on. It has 4 links and 2 of them are footer links. Do you think 34 points would transfer to other pages, allowing 15% for normal evaporation as juice is passed, or do you think Google might do something like this:
Body link 1: 8.5 pts
Body Link 2: 8.5 pts
Footer Link 1: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)
Footer Link 2: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)
Total: Only 27 pts passed (and 7pts of juice lost forever)
This is how I'd imagine excessive footer links hurting a site. I have no idea if it works this way in reality. However, most would agree that external links in the footer are not worth as much as body links, so why would that logic not be applied to internal, navigational links?
SEOmoz has extensive footer links on the home page. Anyone from SEOmoz want to explain how SEOmoz evaluated the use of footer links?
-
Regarding footer links... Google more or less knows they are footer links and treats them as such. If it doesn't make much sense to have so many links then don't. There are better ways to drill down to crucial content that is not one click away from home page nav in general (e.g. content!).
URL length does not matter, but it's good to have a nice hierarchy for clarity (much like breadcrumbs) - however I have noticed an interesting thing... when you do site: Google (among other things) sorts site pages by URL length, starting from shorter down to longer URLs. Does this impact rankings? Maybe. How much? Probably to a tiny digree if at all.
-
I think the question is about conversion too. Everyone wants to find the content they are interested in quickly. Smaller more specific categories do that.
Lumpng content into a flatter structure sounds like it's going to be harder to find the page they want. My 2c.
btw, #2, I still dont understand why sites bother with footer links other than the ubiquitous privacy/terms/contact links which are nofollowed anyway..
-
I tend to agree with you. I suspect that urls with fewer folders rank better because of the flow of juice to those pages, not only because of the number of folders. www.site.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/content.html would probably rank fine if it had a direct link from the home page.
-
Hi There!
I do not believe that the folder structure of your site will have any impact on the way the search engines rank your pages. Your site architechture sholud be logical, and built in the same way that you would create an outline (major categories, subcategories, etc.).
In addition, if you start building your site with all of your files in the main directory, as your site grows you will find it increasingly difficult to manage, and will wish that you had built a well thought-out folder structure. Your folder structure should also be a nice way to get each page raked for the product or service that is featured - as the url is a valuable ranking factor.
Regarding link juice and your site footer - you should make a user friendly footer, the kind that you would find helpful as a visitor to your own site. Forget about link juice. In the works of Matt Cutts, "let it flow free", and focus on quality and making your site nice for visitors.
On the other hand, massive numbers of links could be an issue too - so dont forget to use the seoMoz On-Page Report Card optimzation tool which will give you specific suggestions on managing links and page structure for the best SEO results. It was massively valuable for me.
Best Wishes!
-
FYI, this is a B2B lead gen site. I agree having a flat site with everything a click or 2 away is best. My question is a little more specific and revolves around whether these tactics are worth the time and effort
-
I could manually build navigation and have all of my pages in the main directory or maybe 1 folder deep, OR dynamically build navigation based on folder structure and maybe have a site with many of my pages 2 or 3 folders deep. Any benefit to the former, because the latter is definitely easier.
-
Are extensive footer links generally a net benefit? Looks like SEOmoz uses them.
-
-
Obviously the less clicks to your money pages, the better. Assuming an ecommerce site, can you reach all your product pages with 3 clicks? That's always my goal. I have sub-categories only when needed, and in fact just went through a re-write where I replaced some sub-categories with "richer" product pages that asked more questions. In simple terms I replaced /blue-widgets, /red-widgets, /green-widgets with /widgets that asked the customer what color they wanted.
The result was my conversion rate almost doubled - and traffic has increased so google liked something
I would remove footer links - just worthless noise at best, or viewed as spammy at worst..
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
-
An External link question? based on relevancy
hi lets suppose we have backlinks from these sites page a has 10 ext links. and all external links are industry/niche relevant, one of them points to my site page b has 1 ext link , which points to my site. which one is giving more seo boost.?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Redirecting M Dot Mobile Website to Responsive Design Website Questions
Hi amazing Moz community 🙂 Couldn't find this question anywhere, and knew this was the place to ask! We are helping a client redirect an M Dot website to a Responsive Design website. We want to retain our mobile rankings for keywords. Three questions - We should use 301 redirects from the M Dot website to the new website correct? (not 302s?) How long does it take for Google to understand that we have launched a responsive website? Can we remove the 301 redirects after a few days (if the M Dot website interferes/breaks the new Responsive website)? We have verified an account on Google Search Console for the M Dot website, along with a mobile sitemap that has been submitted and verified. What should we do with this M Dot GSC account? Just delete it? Or keep it and upload the NEW XML Sitemap with the new WWW links (because the website is responsive). THANK YOU!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Canonical questions
Hi, We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories) So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this; Product 1 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmaxwell
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page) Product 2 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns. As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content? Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!0 -
Question about optimising an inner pages apposed to the homepage
Hi Everyone, I'm currently looking to optimise the inner page of a website opposed to the homepage itself. I was wondering if I should stick to some kind of link distribution? For instance, say my website is about widgets and the url is http://www.widgets.com, I want to optimise for a much easier "blue widgets" term on an inner page with the url: http://www.widgets.com/blue-widgets. Does google discriminate against a website with a higher number of links pointing to an inner page than the homepage? If so, what would you recommend a safe distribution between the two? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
[Need advice!] A particular question about a subdomain to subfolder switch
Hello Moz Community! I really was hoping to get your help on a issue that is bothering me for a while now. I know there is a lot of about this topic but I couldn’t find a good answer for my particular question. We are running several web applications that are similar but are also different from each other. Right now, each one has its own subdomain (which was mainly due to technical reasons). Like this: webapp1.rootdomain.com, webapp2.rootdomain.com etc. Our root domain currently points with 301 to webapp1.rootdomain.com. Now, we are thinking about making two changes: changing to a subfolder level like this: rootdomain.com/webapp1 , rootdomain.com/webapp2 etc. Changing our rootdomain to a landing page (lisitng all the apps) and take out the 301 to webapp1 We want to do these changes mainly for SEO reasons. I know that the advantages are not so clear between subdomain/subfolder but we think it could be the right way to go to push the root domain and profit more from juice passing to the different apps. The problem is that we had a bad experience when we first switched from our first wep app (rootdomain.com) to an subdomain (webapp1.rootdomain.com) to set them equal with the other apps. Our traffic dropped a lot and it took us 6 weeks to get back on the same level as before. Maybe it was the 301 not passing all juice or maybe it was the switch to the subdomain. We are not sure. So, I guess my question is do you think it is the right thing to do for web apps to go with subfolders to pass more juice from root to subfolders? Will it bring again huge drops in traffic once we make that change? Is it worth taking that risk or initial drop because it will pay off in the future? Thanks a lot in advance! Your answers would help me a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ummaterial0 -
A few questions regarding listings in Google Places
For an SAB (Service Area Business) with a hidden address - Can you have more then one listing? Can you use a free Google Voice number? Can you forward the number to a main number? Can the listing be in an office building? Such as a rented space... For a non SAB listing with the address visible - Can you use free Google voice numbers for each listing and forward them to one main number?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Duplicate Content Question
My understanding of duplicate content is that if two pages are identical, Google selects one for it's results... I have a client that is literally sharing content real-time with a partner...the page content is identical for both sites, and if you update one page, teh otehr is updated automatically. Obviously this is a clear cut case for canonical link tags, but I'm cuious about something: Both sites seem to show up in search results but for different keywords...I would think one domain would simply win out over the other, but Google seems to show both sites in results. Any idea why? Also, could this duplicate content issue be hurting visibility for both sites? In other words, can I expect a boost in rankings with the canonical tags in place? Or will rankings remain the same?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0 -
Site structure question
Hello Everyone, I have a question regarding site structure and I would like to mastermind it with everyone. So I am optimizing a website for a Ford Dealership in Boston, MA. The way the site architecture is set up is as follows: Home >>>> New Inventory >>> Inventory Page (with search refinement choices) After you refine your search (lets say we choose a Ford F150 in white) it shows a page with images, price information and specs. (Nothing the bots or users can sink their teeth into) My thoughts are to create category pages for each Ford model with awesome written content and THEN link to the inventory pages. So it would look like this: Home >>> New Inventory >>> Ford 150 Awesome Category Page>>>>Ford F150 Inventory Page I would work hard at getting these category pages to rank for the vehicle for our GEO targeted locations. Here is my questions: Would you be annoyed to first land on a category page with lots of written text, reviews images and videos first and then link off to the inventory page. Or would you prefer to go right from the new inventory page to the actual inventory page and start looking for vehicles? Thanks you so much, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0