Welcome to the Q&A Forum

hahaha wLoudogg - don't even suggest that - I've been offered such nonsense plenty of times.  Never makes it any more worth the insanity

It's ultimately irrelevant from an SEO perspective - so it comes down to click tracking.  If you have different actions, you'd want a unique shortened URL for each action.

I'd also suggest considering setting up your own URL shortener, rather than relying on 3rd party.  As great as Bit.ly is, and as much as Twitter offers their own, the only way to ensure a short URL that's generated is always going to be around is to have your own.

If search bots can find the lowest level pages easily enough by other on-site links, then the only real question I would consider has to do with usability - can you present the site map in a way visually that is not overwhelming or confusing to site visitors, if those are included?  Or alternately, by eliminating them, would someone using that site map be annoyed if those are not included?

The SEO value of such links on a site map page are ultimately insignificant at best.

Personally, I wouldn't try to figure out the impact by looking at crawl stats.  I'd be more focused on end results.  Have we had an increase in organic traffic, or conversions from Google shopping since we opened it up, or has either of these gone down?

That's what matters, and is the only real indicator as to whether it was a wise move or not.

Eric,

Unfortunately you're in a very difficult position.  Personally, I would never proceed with a client who can't even define their own audience. They're quite likely going to change their mind often, and if you get involved this early on, will just as likely be overly demanding and play the "needy victim" role.  It's a mess.

Having said that, if you insist that you absolutely must work with them, the best approach might be to choose four, five or six topics you think are appropriate, run them through the Google Keyword tool, export each result set and pass them an Excel spreadsheet with each result set being in a separate tab.  Then, help them understand what the columns mean (competitive, search volume, etc) and let them chew on that data.  Explain that you need them to decide which phrases to go with, but that you can help them refine it down a bit.

Be very careful though to not get sucked into an endless hours vortex!

Brad,

I recommend posting it to your own site first then waiting a bit to distribute.  On that page, I'd include a Google "original source" tag. http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=191283

By doing it this way, you help to ensure that your version has the best chance of being credited properly.  It's not a guarantee - as most challenges in SEO are not, however it's what I recommend to clients because it's the best anyone can do.

There's some disagreement in the industry as to whether the pipe symbol or hyphens are best - either way, one of these two would be recommended for readability purposes.  This is especially valid when you've got more than one keyword phrase.

Product Name | Alternate Product Name | Company Name

While having all those links in the main nav site-wide isn't necessarily helpful to SEO, I routinely deal with clients that have twice as many links in their drop-downs. So I agree with Marcus - it shouldn't be causing you serious problems.

In addition to Marcus' suggestion, I would recommend a couple things to work on:

1.  Sub-navigation

Like you have in the Staff section http://www.ibethel.org/staff - by adding in sub-navigation (links within that section that appear on each page of that section, and only for those pages) you reinforce content relationships.

2. Referrer Code in URLs - Duplicate Content

You've got links that have their URL appended to track referrer source right on the site.  On the home page - the graphic call-out box (large graphic with 3 smaller graphics to the right of it).  These links point to internal pages but stick

"?referrer=front_page" on the end.  And since your graphics rotate, that means every page linked from this area is generating its own duplicate content conflict.  While some programmers say it's fine, it's not.  You could mitigate this by pushing canonical tags across the entire site, however best practices dictate to eliminate this referrer tracking method completely - Google only uses canonical tags as a signal and not all search engines use it.

3. Site Speed

I ran a couple site speed tests - you've got some serious issues regarding crawl speed.  Your home page images are huge files, and you take a second hit with lots of Javascript file loading times.  - More than one check came in at over 13 seconds - that's not user speed - it's crawlability by search bots.  I highly recommend looking further into that.  If it takes search bots too long to crawl just one single page, some of the links on that page will not be found during any single crawl - and this alone could be part of your problem.  Look to have those graphic images compressed without losing quality.  Look to have your Javascript files  compiled.

4.  Store Issues

Your category pages (http://store.ibethel.org/Childrens-Resources/c236/index.html for example) have no paragraph based descriptions so you're missing out on an important way to properly optimize those category pages for SEO.

5. Content Organization

Also in the store - your Books section organization is a bit messed up. So your breadcrumbs are broken.  For example on this sub-category page http://store.ibethel.org/Books-Books/c173_25/index.html the breadcrumb shows Store Home > Catalog > Books > Books   when it should be Store Home > Books.  Except when I go to the top level "Books" link in the breadcrumbs I get an empty page http://store.ibethel.org/Books/c173/index.html

6. Store Page Titles

In the store, when there's more than one page of products in a category, if I click down to the 2nd or 3rd page in that category, I get the same page Title.  Every page title should be unique, so the simplest way to fix that is to append page titles with the page number.  Like Music   then Music | Page 2  then Music | Page 3  and so on.

7. Stronger Titles

Your page titles in the store could be much stronger - Having a page TItle of "Music" isn't going to allow your site to rank extremely well given how competitive that single word is.  You'd be better off with titles like:

Christian Music | Online Christian Music Downloads

Or for "Childrens Resources" a better page Title might be:

Christian Parenting | Christian Education Reources

8. Store Home Page Duplicate

Both http://store.ibethel.org/index.html and http://store.ibethel.org/ work - so that's duplicate content - have the index.html version set up with a 301 redirect pointing to the http://store.ibethel.org version.

Be very careful about dumping massive amounts of content.  It's not all about how many visits came from search.  It's also about the sum-total weight of the site.  If you've got 50,000 pages, that's 50,000 internal links to the home page.  Take away 30,000, that's a massive hit.  Even if each of those pages or the majority of those pages send a tiny little twinkling of link equity, just add them all up.

I've seen client sites take major hits removing that old "worthless" content against my advice.  And as an SEO, I then get to step in and say "here - try getting all those old pages moved over now."  Then watching as they rebound afterward. Slowly.  Painfully.

I totally agree with the notion that User Experience dictates keeping it in a regular site template. And an html page devoted to being a sitemap is supposed to be for users, not search engines.  The days of having one page with nothing but links should be over in everyone's mind anyhow.  If all a page does is provide links, with no content around them, the SEO value of all those links is minor now.

Then we can talk about how much value those sitemap on-page links have anyhow -  if you've got fifty or five hundred links on that page, they're not passing very much value for SEO, regardless of whether there's top navigation, or anything else on the page.

That makes a lot of sense - I had been wondering how many people got "answers" that really didn't help as much as another might have had someone not skipped it because it had "appeared" to have already been answered...

Whether you include the sub-nav in the site-wide navigation as drop-downs or not, make sure that you also have that sub-nav as on-page links (such as in a side-bar) specific to each section.  So that only that sections page links will then be on all of the pages just within that section, without the drop-down needing to be used. This ensures proper attribution and relationship queues for SEO.

Having said that, this issue is widely debated in the industry.  I've seen arguments on both sides claiming they have proof that one or the other of your choices was better.  Personally, I've always taken the approach that SEO should always be balanced with usability.  So when this question comes up I don't tell clients to kill the site-wide drop-downs.  Instead, I focus on other refinement (like the section by section dedicated side-bar links, and proper breadcrumbs, and in-content links, and so forth).  And that has always gotten my clients solid results.

There's bugs I think.  Questions still showing as unanswered even after responses, points not being credited right away after answering (at least that's been my case since last night.  So I reported it over at the help desk.

Ambiguity aside, SEO scales when implemented properly.  I have clients with hundreds of thousands of pages and clients with millions of pages.  Many aspects of SEO can be automated.  Of course, someone still needs to provide unique content, but they'd have to do that even without SEO.

Some important factors though include:

• Well structured data architecture (get those table relationships figured out for scalability from day 1)
• Content organization rules (category,sub-category and deeper relationship rules)
• Site navigation & related UX rules
• Standard Operating Procedure for social engagement and link building

Then we can even get into the debate about how to automate at least some of that social / link building effort as well.

Essentially though, with a proper plan and the right resources, maintaining the SEO of a million page site should not be any more difficult than a 500 page site.

Making such radical changes is always something that shouldn't be taken lightly, that's for sure.  And if it's done, you'll need to have a spreadsheet where you can enter a column with all the page names, a column with their current URLs, and one with the new URLs, because implementing 301 Redirects is critical but can be a nightmare otherwise.

What it comes down to is evaluating the value of other SEO (on-site, link-building, and social) that can be done to improve things as compared with architectural changes.  Judgment calls.  Not always fun.

Roger,

Categorization becomes too flat at the moment you lose high quality visitors.  Since the site started out flat, there's no way to tell what that point it.  The only way to determine if it's already too flat is to refine it.  I always recommend to clients that it's best to have no more than eight to ten top level categories, and only have sidebar navigation that links to sub-categories within the specific category you're in, or at most, those, then below them, two or three additional links to similar top level categories.

The reason for this method is because in the flat model, you have no way of communicating to search engines what the real relationship separation is.  This in turn dilutes the ability to drive more strength to the highest level categories. The end result then is a situation where your top level categories don't do as well for their most important keyword phrases, the sub-category page phrases also suffer, and in turn, individual product pages do as well.

Adding to Seth's response - not only do I agree with him completely, the other factor is how many potential visitors still, to this day, click on those old links only to get 404'd?

Mike,

From a marketers perspective, I'd say "Putting yourselves in your client's mind, are all these testimonials helping convince me?"

Ultimately, unless you do eye-tracking, or A/B split (or even multivariate) testing on this to see what count leads to the highest conversion rate, there's no fixed answer because every site, every user base and every market is unique.  Heck, you could even consider the argument that it's better to have one or two on sidebars on every page rather than all on one page (as yet one more thing to test with).

SEOpt,

building highly links to internal folders and individual pages is critical to long term SEO.  It's the single most important method of communicating to search engines that "This section of the site really is as important / authoritative as we claim through our internal architecture and content organization.".

Every quality link into the site, regardless of where it points, brings more strength to the entire site as well.  Both from the concept that it's one more link into the site, and also as those internal pages gain value/ranking strength, they better support the site higher up in the chain.

Jean,

The more important question is how relevant a directory or association site is to the market your trying to target?  Inbound link profiles require you have links coming from sites and directories that have a variety of performance indicators, from relatively low up to as high as you can obtain.

If that association is quite appropriate to your site's purpose and intent, not only do you get the benefit of relevance relationships, you can also potentially get people clicking through to your site from your listing there.  Highly relevant people.  Which itself is both good for business and a strong signal to search engines that it's a valuable link, and your site is important.