Is there any advantage to including a subdirectory in a URL?

[james-tb]

This post is deleted!

[brettmandoes]

There are two good reasons to avoid the structure you've proposed: user experience and SEO. As your website gets larger, having more and more and more links from the homepage to each individual article is going to be a massive navigation headache, and will be confusing to users. If you're planning on orphaning that content so it's not accessible from the homepage, then again, you're creating a confusing navigational structure that will not be beneficial to users or to you from an SEO perspective.

The subdirectories are providing a no-nonsense approach to finding information quickly and efficiently in a manner that people are accustomed to. If the issue is that the subdirectories themselves are confusing, I would just rework the content so they make more sense and facilitate navigation.

There's also a loose rule about the number of links on a single page - try to stay below 100.

But if you have a small website and can organize the links in a manner that doesn't look like a hoarder designed it, then the structure you're proposing may be workable. I would just be very cautious about implementing a flat architecture like that for a medium - large site.

[james-tb]

Thanks for the reply! I can see your way of thinking, but the concept of navigating by directory seems to be a very dated way of thinking.

I don't intend to have, say "publisher.com/food/" landing pages—the navigation menu will point users to any appropriate archive views. On a site that did have those landing pages live, I can see that a few users might want to find their way around via subdirectory. But I think virtually all web users navigate by click, not by URL, especially on mobile.

There will be a central "feed" that links to all content, and this feed will be paginated back to the beginning of all posts. I believe this is sufficient for Googlebot, no? Setting aside any UI / nav issues, is there a structural reason to keep subdirs in a URL?

[brettmandoes]

If by structural reason you mean SEO then I can't foresee the structure you've proposed giving you an advantage in the SERP because you're diluting pagerank from the homepage. Let me explain:

Our fictional site example.com has five subdirectories that it links to from the homepage. Your homepage has a certain amount of pagerank - for simplicity's sake let's say it's 100 units. That gets divided out to each of those pages it links to. So example.com/shoes now has 20 pagerank. And each of the pages your subdirectory links to gets pagerank from /shoes. So let's say you have 10 pages under that subdirectory so example.com/shoes/heels has 2 units of pagerank.

With your new structure, you have 50 links from the homepage instead of the 5 you had before, and your 100 units will be divided by 50, meaning those interior pages (example.com/shoes/heels) are still getting 2 pagerank, but your top level pages are gone so you lose any ranking ability they had.

To the best of our knowledge, pagerank still works like this, though Google has acknowledged that its been fine tuned over the years, and I'm still not sure how they account for sites like Pinterest that use infinite scroll. But if you're competing for national terms like "shoe sales" then backlinks and the ranking power they provide are going to matter for you.

Regardless of all this, I still advocate what's best for the user experience because ultimately if this change you're making will improve their experience, you'll be linked to more often, engagement will improve, they'll convert more often, and your business will grow. Whereas if this improvement boosts your rankings but you lose conversions then you've failed to align your SEO goals with your business goals.

I hope this is helpful - discussions about technical structure is difficult when you don't have a visual. If I'm missing the mark, link some examples from another website that's similar to what you're trying to do.

[james-tb]

Thanks very much for the detailed reply. This sort of makes me sound like a dick... but I should probably mention I have a good amount of SEO experience, and understand how pagerank flows through a site hierarchy. I've done SEO at 400k+ URL sites before. The thing is, the last time SEO was my full-time job was 2012—and a whole lot has changed since then.

I'm not interested in changing the URL scheme because I think it will benefit our SEO. I think our rankings will probably suffer slightly (just by virtue of the fact we're making ANY changes), and I'm ok with a small hit. The way I see it, the existing structure is unnecessary and a little clunky, so why not trim it sooner rather than later?

Clickhole is a great example of a URL structure the same as the site I'm currently working on.

http://www.clickhole.com/article/5-explorers-who-saw-americas-columbus-turned-back--5356#1,
http://www.clickhole.com/theysaidwhat/find-out-what-rihanna-bear-grylls-and-jane-goodall-5368
http://www.clickhole.com/quiz/we-can-determine-which-state-youre-just-way-you-an-1908

Each of these URLs has a subdirectory... and each subdirectory leads to a 404. The archive views are located at different URLs:

http://www.clickhole.com/features/news/
http://www.clickhole.com/features/they-said-what/
http://www.clickhole.com/features/quizzes/

The user experience of Clickhole is just fine (there are no links to the plain subdirs, so a user could only end up there if they typed the address is) and I'm sure there's no SEO loss-Clickhole isn't trying to rank for "article," "theysaidwhat," or "quiz."

The thing is, those original URLs are a little cluttered. I'd just as soon make them

http://www.clickhole.com/5-explorers-who-saw-americas-columbus-turned-back--5356#1,
http://www.clickhole.com/find-out-what-rihanna-bear-grylls-and-jane-goodall-5368
http://www.clickhole.com/we-can-determine-which-state-youre-just-way-you-an-1908

Is there anything aside from UI (or conflicts with duplicate URL text) I'm missing?

[brettmandoes]

I can't think of anything beyond what you've already explored. Instead of completely deleting those pages, just add in a 301 redirect to something relevant so you minimize any loss from those pages disappearing.

Best of luck on your new design!

[james-tb]

Thanks very much! Appreciate your thought and insight.