Page Hierarchy Question

[BillWoods]

I understand the basic concept of page hierarchy, i.e. parent and child pages.

My question is: Should the home page be the parent of all 2nd-level pages?  Can/should there only be one top-level page, the home page?

In other words, is this:

site.com/homesite.com/home/products    site.com/home/products/widgetsite.com/home/aboutsite.com/home/contactbetter than this:site.com/homesite.com/products    site.com/products/widgetsite.com/aboutsite.com/contactThanks for your opinion!

[Roman-Delcarmen]

ANSWER  Yes, your home page will be the parent of all 2nd-level pages and any other page no matter the level

Your site needs a certain structure. Otherwise, it’ll just be a collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need the structure to navigate through your site, to click from one page to the other. And Google uses the structure of your site in order to determine what content is important and what content is less important

Structuring your website is crucial for both usability and findability. A lot of sites lack a decent structure to guide visitors to the product they’re looking for. Apart from that, having a clear site structure leads to better understanding of your site by Google

The structure of your site should be like a pyramid. On the top of the pyramid is your homepage, and underneath the homepage a number of category pages. For larger sites, you should make subcategories or custom taxonomies (more on that later). Within the categories and subcategories, you will have a number of blog posts, pages or product pages.

If you’ve not yet divided the blog posts or product pages on your site into a number of categories, you should definitely do so Make sure to add these categories to the main menu of your site.

Your linking structure is of great importance. Each page in the top of a pyramid should link to its subpages. And vice versa, all the subpages should link back to the pages on top of the pyramid.

[EGOL]

I believe that the folders that your pages are placed in are less important than the linkage of your website.

Folders are the structure used to organize files on a server.

Linkage is how a website's structure is presented to the visitor and to Google.  Linkage includes your persistent navigation, breadcrumbs, and the in-content links that you are publishing to visitors.   It can also include link inputs from other websites.   This is the structure that Google uses to discover how linkjuice and visitors flow through your website.  Then they will use that information to decide which pages and parts of your website are really important.

Files in the same folder can have dramatic differences in importance on the basis of linkvalue, visitor useage, and traffic entry.  They can also have very different power inputs produced by links into them from other websites.  Files deep in folder structures can have higher PA than your homepage,  files deep in your folder structure of your website can get more traffic than your homepage.

It is not unusual for a website to have third-level (and deeper) pages that get 10x as much traffic as the homepage.  These are pages that have gained visibility in high volume SERPs or have gained visibility across an enormous number of queries.

Its possible that 90% of visitors never see the homepage.   Instead they land on a deep page and are routed through the site by effective navigation, breadcrumbs, on-site search and in-content links.

Wikipedia is an example of a website where folder structure is meaningless and enormous traffic and linkvalue flows through in-content links.   Amazon is a site where folder structure is meaningless and enormous traffic and linkvalue flows through dynamic persistent navigation, dynamic breadcrumbs, product recommendations and powerful on-site search.

Consider how your site can best serve the visitor.  Decide how you can modify that to make the site best-serve your business goals.  There is where you should spend significant thought and time.

[WebMarkets]

All excellent answers. my only tip, make sure your URLs are short, tight, and clean!

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Very good point Kris