Corporate pages and SEO help

[Eric_edvisors]

We own and operate more than two dozen educational related sites.  The business team is attempting to standardize some parts of our site hierarchy so that our sitemap.php, about.php, privacy.php and contact.php are all at the root directory.  Our sitemap.php is generated by our sitemap.xml files, which are generated from our URLlist.txt files.

I need to provide some feedback on this initiative.

I'm worried about adding more stand-alone pages to our root directory and as part of a separate optimization in the future I was planning to suggest we group the "privacy", "about" and "contact" pages in a separate folder. We generally try to put our most important pages/directories for SEO in the root as our homepages pass a lot of link juice and have high authority.

We do not invest SEO time into optimizing these pages as they're not pages we're trying to rank for, and I've already been looking into even no-following all links to them from our footer, sitemap, etc.

I know that adding these "corporate" pages to a site are usually a standard part of the design process but is there any SEO benefit to having them at the root?  And along the same lines, is there any SEO harm to having unimportant pages at the root?

What do you guys think out there in Moz land?

[FranckNlemba]

Hello Eric,

we do same thing that you in all our ecommerce websites for three reasons:

First is important for us to give access to google to all the pages of the website through the "html sitemap" file for example

The second reason is that we like ranking high for "corporate pages" specially when searchers are seeking details about our brand. This is specially important for us since a lot of people in the seo community thinks google "loves" brand and this WBF has definetely convince us that this is a right approach

Finally what we have observed for several years is that these pages tend to rank higher and attract natural links, then we use that link juice to enhance the power of deep pages

[Eric_edvisors]

Hi Franck - Thank you for your response.  I totally understand that strategy for an e-commerce site and for other types of sites.  You need those corporate pages to establish brand trust and information for someone who is wondering who you are. However, for us, our content is really our value -- people don't purchase anything on our sites.  Only a few of our sites see, or expect, any branded traffic.  Our traffic is driven mostly by people looking for help with various financial aid issues and our content is the solution we hope they find.  Obviously if they search for "sitename + privacy policy" we want our page to come up, but other than that, we just need it accessible on the site.  Does anyone else have a site where they don't want to rank for these pages and have stuck them in a more appropriate place within the site architecture to match the value they bring?