Site Architecture
A site’s architecture refers to the structure of pages on a website and how they are linked together. Site architecture affects how search engine’s crawl a website and how users navigate through a site. As an important factor for SEO, our Hangout Notes cover best practice guidance and advice to ensure your site architecture is optimally structured. To learn more about the ins and outs of this topic, make sure you check out our Ultimate Guide to Site Architecture Optimisation.
Consider Merging Similar Category Pages to Consolidate Authority in Search
Consider evaluating category pages to see if they can be merged to make even stronger ones, especially if two category pages are ranking for similar clusters of queries.
Content Less Than 3 Clicks From Homepage is Good Practice But Not Required
Keeping content no more than 3 clicks from the homepage is good practice but not a requirement for Google.
Tag Pages Are Usually Seen as Low Quality
Tag pages are usually low quality and look like search results pages, so it doesn’t make sense for Google to show them in search results and the prefer to show pages with content.
Microsites Can Be Seen as Doorway Pages
Microsites often look like a collection of doorway pages. If you are looking to build these microsites up in the long run then this might be an option, but if they don’t have value beyond driving traffic to another site, then microsites aren’t recommended for search and should be noindexed.
Test Navigation Models to Reduce Click Depth & Improve UX
Consider testing out different navigation models on your site to improve user experience and reduce click depth to important products/pages on your site.
Place Links to Important Pages Higher in a Site Hierarchy
Make sure links to your most important pages are relatively high up in a site hierarchy so Googlebot and users can reach them quickly and so Google can pass Pagerank more quickly.
Canonicalise Faceted pages to Non-filtered Version
Google recommends allowing crawling of faceted pages but canonicalise to non-filtered version of that page instead of blocking them with robots.txt.
Indexable Product Variations Should Reflect Search Behaviour
Variations of pages which people are searching for should be made indexable, otherwise the variations should be folded together.
Orphaned Pages may be Noindexed
Orphaned pages will be re-crawled, taking up some crawl budget, and usually remain indexed, and can still show up in search results but if there are no internal links then they will be considered unimportant, and they might eventually fall out of the index.
Consolidating Product Variations onto a Single Page Avoids Dilution
You can have a separate page with unique content for product variations, but this can dilute the authority so John generally recommends consolidating them into a stronger single page which contains the variations in the text.