Site structure / IA out of balance? What does that mean to SEO?
-
I often see commentators mentioning out of balance site structures/IA but what does this actually mean in SEO terms?
For example, Yoast advises: "If one category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance." Neil Patel advises "Try to balance the amount of subcategories within each category. Basically, try to keep it approximately even. If one main category has fourteen subcategories, while another main category has only three subcategories, this could become a little unbalanced."
Does this have any direct influence on SEO (crawlability, etc.) or is this more a UX issue? I look forward to receiving your feedback.
-
Hi Steve and thanks for the feedback - it would definitely be interesting to check - I can't imagine this is a huge issue on uncomplicated sites without thousands of pages, but who knows... testing is needed. All the best, Luke
-
Hi Luke,
Disclaimer first: I have not carried out any testing on this, so this is just a theory.
After reading your question, my initial thought process is that by having more subcategories or content in one category you are suggesting to the search engines that this is your primary area of focus.
Think about it from Google or Bings point of view, if you have 50 subcategories with 10 posts each for blue widgets and only have 10 subcategories with 5 posts each for red widgets what would you think?
I would look at a site like that and think oh these guys do blue widgets, and maybe a few red widgets.
It is an interesting concept though and might be worth testing.
Steve
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Our new site will be using static site generator which is supposed to be better for SEO?
Hi folks, Our dev team is planning on building our new marketing webpages on SSG or Static Site Generator(we are stepping away from SSR). Based on my research this is something that can help our SEO in particular for site speed (our site has a poor score).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl
Are there any challenges or concerns I should be aware regarding this direction? If so what are they and how can this be addressed? Thanks0 -
Site structure for location + services pages
We are in the process of restructuring our site and are trying to figure out Google's preference for location pages and services. Let's say we are an auto repair company with lots of locations and each one of them offer some unique services, while other services are offered by all or most other locations. Should we have a global page for each service live with a link to the location page for each shop that offers that service? OR Should we built a unique page about each service for every location as a subfolder of each location (essentially creating a LOT of sub pages because each location has 15-20 services. Which will rank better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
URL Structure For E-commerce Sites
Hi Guys, I was wondering what would be the optimal and best URL structure for sub-categories on a E-commerce site for SEO purposes. Example if my category was dresses and I had multiple sub-categories within dresses would 1 or 2 below be the better URL structure? 1) Domain + Category + Sub-Category be the most suitable URL structure: Sleeveless Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/dresses/sleeveless-dresses Midi Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/dresses/midi-dresses 2) OR would excluding the category be better Domain + Sub-Category like: Sleeveless Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/sleeveless-dresses Midi Dresses URL: clothingstore.com/midi-dresses Do you think it makes much of a difference, is shorter better and more effective in this case? E.g. Rand discuses in this article: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls that having the keyword in the URL serves as anchor text, so wouldn't having additional keywords dilute value in this case? Plus he mentions shorter URLs the better. Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright1 -
Website/SEO Audit Needed
We've been outsourcing our link building to India for the past 3 years and the results were pretty good up until beginning of this year. What they were essentially doing is putting links into directories, a few per month, and posting a few articles per month. Out of our top 10 keywords, 8 got into top 10. Then something happened around Jan 1 last year, our ranking started dropping, falling out of the top 50, before settling around 20-30ish. We disavowed most of the low quality links since then. Also, very odd, all the top ranking competitors all fell (including me) and were replaced by less "specialized" companies who sold a broad range of products (for example: all parts of the car, rather than someone who just focused on mufflers). Theres also other differences but again I can't put a finger on it. I'd like to find someone who can do a detailed audit of our site, and our competitors, what happened to cause the drop, and why the new top positions sites are ranked high. And I really don't have time to do an audit myself. Our site is American Hospitality Furniture dot com. Any feed back would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AHH8880 -
Http://blogsearch.google.com/ping
Is there any reason why a website would submit all their content (videos, photo galleries, articles) to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
How do you prevent the mobile site becoming a duplicate of the full browser site?
We have a larger site with 100k+ pages, we need to create a mobile site which gets indexed in the mobile engines but I am afraid that google bot will consider these pages duplicates of the normal site pages. I know I can block it on the robots.txt but I still need it to be indexed for mobile search engines and I think google has a mobile crawler as well. Feel free to give me any other tips that I should follow while trying to optimize the mobile version. Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0 -
One platform, multiple niche sites: Worth $60/mo so each site has different class C?
Howdy all, The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase. In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.) The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process. The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qurve0 -
WWW vs Non-WWW/Moving a site to a new CMS/Redirect all of the previous URLs
We are working on a new design for a website, which is currently on a CMS that has non-seo-friendly URLs. There is no redirection of 'www' to non-www or vice versa, or handling of homepage redirection so there is only one instance of 'home'. To move the site in the future, all of these URLs will have to be redirected to their new, and I hope, seo-friendly counterparts. Is it prudent now to redirect the four home page links so there is only one? and to redirect all non-www to 'www' so there is only one instance of each page? Or should I leave it and redirect all of them when the time comes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | haan_seo0