Site architecture: Deep drop menus & flat hidden menu?

[BBuck]

I hope this makes sense. I am creating a site that will have normal drop down menu structure that will be about 3 levels deep: site.com/category/topic/sub-topic . I also want to add content that will be set up under a hidden menu, but with a sidebar module (placed on the relevant pages that are set up under the drop down) with links to other custom pages that will be relevant to the drop menu pages, but i'm hoping that the flat structure pages will show better for search: site.com/content-page

The reason I am asking is because I have seen a competitor do this for a personal injury law firm and they show everywhere (throughout California) for vanity search -"city car accident lawyer". When you go to the site, they have a personal injury drop down that is 3 layers deep, but when you click down the layers, and look at the URL, they are all "flat" site.com/car-accident-lawyer, not site.com/personal-injury/accidents/car-accident-lawyer.

Is having a hidden menu a problem? Is this strategy problematic in any way?

Hope that makes sense. Thank you for any direction.

BB

[Saijo.George]

I am not sure if I understood this properly, can you point us to the competitor's site to have a look at it.

You can have a landing page like site.com/car-accident-lawyer and have the header navigation setup as site.com >> personal-injury >> accidents >> car-accident-lawyer. There is nothing wrong with that , but personally I prefer to classify content in to topics / sub topics, instead of having all the lading pages one hop away.

[Lumina]

Hi BBuck,

I think I understand what you're saying, and there are 2 separate issues that I see you've brought up

First, while there's nothing necessarily wrong with distributing navigation the way you've described, I find from a UX (user experience) standpoint that this is best avoided. Aside from that, I'm unaware of any reason it would be a bad practice.

As for the URL issue you mention in the second paragraph, that can be taken care of with 301 redirects / rewrites. Basically, take this example: I have a page that's www.example.com/familiar/general/specific, but I don't want such a long URL. Using 301 redirects and rewrites, I would have the page stay the same, but the end of the URL could be whatever I want, like www.example.com/specific. If you're unfamiliar with how that works, I suggest either hiring a developer to do it (which would take a few seconds per page), or finding a quick tutorial if you have access to your website's back-end.

I hope that helps you!