Architecture questions.

[dvansant]

I have two architecture related questions.

1. Fewer folders is better. For example, www.site.com/product should rank better than www.site.com/foldera/folderb/product, all else constant. However, to what extreme does it make sense to remove folders? With a small site of 100 or so pages, why not put all files in the main directory? You'd have to manually build the navigation versus tying navigation to folder structure, but would the benefit justify the additional effort on a small site?

2. I see a lot of sites with expansive footer menus on the home page and sometimes on every page. I can see how that would help indexing and user experience by making every page a click or two apart. However, what does that do to the flow of link juice? Does Google degrade the value of internal footer links like they do external footer links? If Google does degrade internal footer links, then having a bunch of footer links would waste link juice by sending a large portion of juice through degraded links, wouldn't it?

Thank you in advance,

-Derek

[TellThemEverything]

Obviously the less clicks to your money pages, the better. Assuming an ecommerce site, can you reach all your product pages with 3 clicks?  That's always my goal. I have sub-categories only when needed, and in fact just went through a re-write where I replaced some sub-categories with "richer" product pages that asked more questions. In simple terms I replaced /blue-widgets, /red-widgets, /green-widgets with /widgets that asked the customer what color they wanted.

The result was my conversion rate almost doubled - and traffic has increased so google liked something

I would remove footer links - just worthless noise at best, or viewed as spammy at worst..

[dvansant]

FYI, this is a B2B lead gen site. I agree having a flat site with everything a click or 2 away is best. My question is a little more specific and revolves around whether these tactics are worth the time and effort

1. I could manually build navigation and have all of my pages in the main directory or maybe 1 folder deep, OR dynamically build navigation based on folder structure and maybe have a site with many of my pages 2 or 3 folders deep. Any benefit to the former, because the latter is definitely easier.

2. Are extensive footer links generally a net benefit? Looks like SEOmoz uses them.

[JimSkychief]

Hi There!

I do not believe that the folder structure of your site will have any impact on the way the search engines rank your pages. Your site architechture sholud be logical, and built in the same way that you would create an outline (major categories, subcategories, etc.).

In addition, if you start building your site with all of your files in the main directory, as your site grows you will find it increasingly difficult to manage, and will wish that you had built a well thought-out folder structure. Your folder structure should also be a nice way to get each page raked for the product or service that is featured - as the url is a valuable ranking factor.

Regarding link juice and your site footer - you should make a user friendly footer, the kind that you would find helpful as a visitor to your own site. Forget about link juice. In the works of Matt Cutts, "let it flow free", and focus on quality and making your site nice for visitors.

On the other hand, massive numbers of links could be an issue too - so dont forget to use the seoMoz On-Page Report Card optimzation tool which will give you specific suggestions on managing links and page structure for the best SEO results. It was massively valuable for me.

Best Wishes!

[dvansant]

I tend to agree with you. I suspect that urls with fewer folders rank better because of the flow of juice to those pages, not only because of the number of folders. www.site.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/content.html would probably rank fine if it had a direct link from the home page.

[TellThemEverything]

I think the question is about conversion too. Everyone wants to find the content they are interested in quickly. Smaller more specific categories do that.

Lumpng content into a flatter structure sounds like it's going to be harder to find the page they want. My 2c.

btw, #2, I still dont understand why sites bother with footer links other than the ubiquitous privacy/terms/contact links which are nofollowed anyway..

[Dan-Petrovic]

Regarding footer links... Google more or less knows they are footer links and treats them as such. If it doesn't make much sense to have so many links then don't. There are better ways to drill down to crucial content that is not one click away from home page nav in general (e.g. content!).

URL length does not matter, but it's good to have a nice hierarchy for clarity (much like breadcrumbs) - however I have noticed an interesting thing... when you do site: Google (among other things) sorts site pages by URL length, starting from shorter down to longer URLs. Does this impact rankings? Maybe. How much? Probably to a tiny digree if at all.

[dvansant]

Thanks, I've noticed the site: www issue that you mention, but I'm coming around to the idea that it's a result of other factors, not the length of the url itself.

Do you think Google degrades internal footer links? Here is my concern illustrated in an example:

Image a home page with "40 points" of link juice to pass on. It has 4 links and 2 of them are footer links. Do you think 34 points would transfer to other pages, allowing 15% for normal evaporation as juice is passed, or do you think Google might do something like this:

Body link 1: 8.5 pts

Body Link 2: 8.5 pts

Footer Link 1: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)

Footer Link 2: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)

Total: Only 27 pts passed (and 7pts of juice lost forever)

This is how I'd imagine excessive footer links hurting a site. I have no idea if it works this way in reality. However, most would agree that external links in the footer are not worth as much as body links, so why would that logic not be applied to internal, navigational links?

SEOmoz has extensive footer links on the home page. Anyone from SEOmoz want to explain how SEOmoz evaluated the use of footer links?

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

[CleverPhD]

Hi James,

It sounds like when you consolidated widgets, you gave Google more of a focused page for persons to search for vs a larger number of pages on the same product.  This is interesting as it is the inverse of the long tail effect.  You would think that more pages around a given product would be better.  I guess this would be a search case where too many pages was a bad thing.  Makes me think of how we setup pagination to make sure Google does not focus on p 2,3,4,5 etc but work the noindexes to have focus on page 1 of the pagination.

Thanks for the post!