Query on Site Architecture

[pragnesh9639]

Hi All,

When I check on my ecommerce site in one of the architecture tool in that my Ecommerce Homepage interlink with 765 pages whereas  when I check few competitors and big brands then there homepage linked with 28 pages, 33, 47, 57 etc not like my site 765 pages.

Do I am wrong anywhere? Can you please check the screenshot of mine & one of the competitor's site architecture?

Because as per me site architecture also play good role in google organic ranking.

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[Joe.Robison]

Most of the time, you'll get really high numbers if you have 765 pages in your site and the home page is accessible in the navigation from every page. It's like this for 99.9% of sites, where the home page is accessible from every page.

I think that simply, you have 765 pages on your site, and they only have 28 or 33.

Is that the case when you type "site:websitename.com" in Google search?

[pragnesh9639]

Hi Joe,

In my case when I type "site:websitename.com" in Google search? it is showing 27000 where in rest all competitors 9k, 12k, 15k and 50k + Here I am talking purely for ecommerce site.

What I find is  that there category pages are interlinked more i.e. 500+, 600+ etc

Any suggestion?

Thanks!

[KristinaKledzik]

There's no magical number of internal links that you want to strive for, though in general, you want to maximize the number of internal links to your homepage and other important pages, and link to the most important pages on your site from your homepage.

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I did put together a guide on SEO internal linking (which is really site navigation) a couple of years ago: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/ It still holds up, since site structure is forever.

In case you don't want to dive into that, here's what I'd recommend for internal linking for ecommerce sites:

• Put your logo in the upper right hand corner of every page on your site, and use that to link back to the homepage. It's a really common navigational tactic, and it tells Google what your homepage is (in case it's not simply www.yoursite.com)
• Use a top navigation bar that's on every page. In the top navigation bar, link to your shopping categories.
• Use a side navigation to list subcategories when a visitor is working within a category.
• Make sure to include breadcrumbs when you're on a product page.
• Limit the number of links on any given page to below 200 (bigger sites do more, but that's because they can get away with it)

Really, that should do 99% of the SEO organization you want to do within your site.

Good luck!

Kristina

[KristinaKledzik]

It's not a good or bad thing if you have 27,000 pages that Google has indexed on your site. What's important is, how many of your pages has Google indexed, how many of those are duplicates, and how many of those are unimportant pages?

To find how many of your pages Google has indexed:

1. Make sure that you have an XML sitemap that includes EVERY PAGE on your site.
2. Submit that to Google Search Console.
3. Check back in a day or so, and Google Search Console will show you how many of the pages on your XML sitemap are in their index.

If you only have 5,000 pages on your site, but Google shows that you have 27,000, then you're probably dealing with duplicate pages, or tags that are built by your site and have gotten out of control.

To find out if Google has indexed duplicate versions of your pages:

1. Use Google Analytics' Search Channel report (Acquisition All Traffic Channels Organic, then change the Dimension to Landing Page) to download a list of all pages on your site Google or Bing has sent visitors to.
2. Create a new column, stripping out portions of the URL that can change without changing the content of the page. Some common offenders:

• Parameters
• Different categories earlier on in the URL
• www vs non-www
• https vs http

4. Now, find the duplicates in the "unique" column. I like using the countif function for this.
5. For any page that's got duplicates, find a way to fix those! It varies by the problem, but the answer is generally to 301 redirect all versions to one canonical version.

To find out if you have too many tags, because they're autogenerated

1. Use an internal tool, like an XML sitemap creator, to figure out how many tags you have
2. Compare that to the number of tags actually bringing you traffic
3. Check to see if you're creating tag pages that are the same content as your category pages
4. Check to see how many tag pages you have with fewer than five products matching - those probably aren't great pages!

Going through these steps should let you know if your site is well optimized - again, it's not the total count that matters!

Good luck!

Kristina