Site Structures That Bleed.

RomesFall

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A while back I was working with a conveyancing client in the UK SERPs... They had a lot of issues with their site and their SEO in general.

We're talking about typical panic stricken business owners with a little experience in SEO; A la 'Let's disavow all our links that aren't perfect.' They were using LinkDetox and had basically disavowed all their good links as well. We're talking about BBC links etc.

Their biggest problem though was their on-page strategy and specifically their site's structure. Level 2 pages with PA 1 and they were wondering why they weren't ranking first page for those location + keyword terms.

Basic Statistics:
Homepage: PA 46 Site: DA 36
Homepage: TF 43 CF 35
11,400 Indexed Pages

Prior to an exponential rise in pages on the site they used to rank very well for all of their keywords. In January they changed their strategy and site structure, deciding that producing more content will result in better rankings. The site structure changed to accommodate the huge increase in pages.

An average page had 50 OBLs and the homepage had 114 OBLs.

Unfortunately convincing them this was not a great strategy was extremely difficult and so I had them set up some tests. They falsely believed that an increase in pages with unique content guarantees an increase in relevancy / authority.

This simply isn't true when your site structure is jumbled and confused, if you don't make it obvious to Google's crawlers then you're worse off than a site with 100 pages with a tight site structure where each page benefits the pages they link to and the pages they're linked from.

Their desperation to find places to include the new content from meant that the link flow got divided so badly that anything after level 2 depth in the structure was receiving none whatsoever.

Their new content had no real purpose and had messed things up big time.

Their Structure:

With such a big site it's not worth me mapping it all out so I'll stick with the important parts.

Level 0 - Homepage (114 OBLs)
Level 1 - /conveyancing-solicitors (94 OBLs)
Level 2 - service-search/be-bi - Bl-Bu,Ca,Ce-Co,Cu-De,Do-Ea,Es-Fl,Gl-Gr,Gw-He,Is-Ke,La-Li,Ma,Me-Ne,No,Ox-Rh,Ru-So,St-Su,Sw-Va,Wa-We,Wi-Wr (384 OBLs)

The level 2 service search page had a total of 20 of these pages like above and then a further 9 for London areas as well - e.g. North, East etc. These are simply hallway pages linked to from virtually every page of the site (compared to most of their level 2s it actually had an OK PA). Each page had a maddening 384 OBLs. Bye bye sweet Link Flow.

In total their site was about 5 levels deep and it wasn't uncommon to see a level 2 page link directly to a level 5 one.

This goes to show where a lot of their problems were.

Test Premise:

The tests I devised were to draw a direct comparison with their main competitors. My ex-clients couldn't understand why their site was being outranked by one with lower homepage PA / DA than them.

Because of their poor link flow I was having to link direct from homepage to some level 3/4 internal pages. I say 3 slash 4 because their structure is so poor that it's hard to tell what level it was.

They also couldn't believe that their competitors 'poor keyword stuffed content' was ranking as well as it was.

So the tests had a two-pronged approach and this was to test keyword density and link flow.

Page Testing:

  • Two will focus purely on keyword density.

  • Two will focus purely on internal links.

  • Two will focus on moderate keyword density, with a moderate amount of internal links.

  • Two will focus on extreme keyword density and minor internal links.

  • Two will focus on minor keyword density, with extreme internal links.
They never got round to making the KW Density changes which sums them up in a sense... They had absolutely no patience for technical details. Obviously keyword density is a small consideration, but I wanted to draw those comparisons to their competitors to prove they were going about things the wrong way.

These are the pages we focused on...

Link From Footer.

Portsmouth
Derby
Manchester
Liverpool
Leeds
Nottingham
Bristol
Leicester

Anchor text should be Location Conveyancing Solicitor.

From Internal Pages We Want The Following Links.
Porstmouth > Bristol
Derby > Bristol
Manchester > Bristol
Liverpool > Bristol

Anchor text should be Conveyancing In Location

Portsmouth > Leicester
Derby > Leicester
Manchester > Leicester
Liverpool > Leicester
Leeds > Leicester
Nottingham > Leicester

Anchor text should be Conveyancing In Location.

Results:

I did have a tracking link for these tests, when I stopped working with them I removed it though as I didn't really have the intention of ever sharing this stuff at the time.

Of all the pages though which do you think had the most major SERP movement?

Leicester.

Now the test itself wasn't ideal for a lot of reasons and wasn't even me implementing a structure I would advise. I simply wanted to improve the metrics of these pages to see how they improved.

Leicester ended up with a PA of 23 and the others varied from 15 - 19.

What structure did I suggest for their location based keyword service lead gen site?

I suggested a complete overhaul and implementing silo's. It was around this point that we parted ways as they were becoming lax with paying me on time and they weren't serious in my opinion about making these changes.

Have they made any changes since I left? No of course not.

Conclusion:

I'm not saying there is a one size fits all site structure out there for everyone, in many ways I think it depends on what you're websites purpose is as to what will make the most sense.

You do need to map out a structure and make sure that it makes sense, make sure that the structure is tightly themed for relevancy and that you keep your OBLs as low as possible to keep link flow healthy.

I also think it's generally poor to have a site more than 3 levels deep in most cases, and certainly there's a logic to this and the premise is that level 0 links to 1 and 2 links to 3 etc.

If your structure has you linking all over the place you're going to bleed link flow and probably mess up with relevancy factors too.

Google's Crawler-Janitors do use LSI among other things to determine relevancy of pages to not only the SERPs you're trying to rank on, but to the pages they're being linked from and are linking to... The further away from the parent level you get the less relevant it's going to get so keep the structure logical.

What they needed to do was reduce their OBLs by rebuilding the structure that couldn't really cope with the new influx of pages. They could have built more level 1 pages and put these new pages into new structures, then link between structures e.g. Level 1 'Conveyancing Solicitors' to 'Conveyancing Advice', except they decided to keep these all within the same directories that they were already using which was where they messed themselves up with their link flow.

Lesson: Assess your site structure as the website grows.

If you have any site structure tips or questions let's post them in this thread and get a conversation going!

* OBLs in most cases these were internal links.

- RF
 
Last edited:
Sorry to not comment on the rest of your topic just yet, as I'm slightly in a hurry. I do have a question though. Did they use hyperlinked breadcrumbs? You know the type...

Level 0 > Level 1 > Level 2 > Current Page

I don't necessarily agree with Silo's these days. They are far too hard to control like a TRUE silo without harming usability. But you can definitely provide navigation in the form of menu's and sidebars and pages with just table of contents, and then only use in-content links to form the "silo". I'm pretty sure page rank flows at different rates through a navigation link versus an editorial link. But Google uses the navigation to understand the structure and silo aspect.
 
Sorry to not comment on the rest of your topic just yet, as I'm slightly in a hurry. I do have a question though. Did they use hyperlinked breadcrumbs? You know the type...

Level 0 > Level 1 > Level 2 > Current Page

I don't necessarily agree with Silo's these days. They are far too hard to control like a TRUE silo without harming usability. But you can definitely provide navigation in the form of menu's and sidebars and pages with just table of contents, and then only use in-content links to form the "silo". I'm pretty sure page rank flows at different rates through a navigation link versus an editorial link. But Google uses the navigation to understand the structure and silo aspect.

They weren't using breadcrumbs no and yes link weight does affect link flow as well, so it is hard to know all the variables to be fair!

Navigation > Footer
Body > Navigation

(Anything that re-occurs sitewide in the code tends to get devalued which is why server side includes are a good idea for sculpting link flow)
 
Look at this rubbish, this is why people like my ex-client screw up so bad...

Is it possible to have good seo simply by having great content?
http://moz.com/blog/is-it-possible-...ly-by-having-great-content-whiteboard-friday?

Moz...

hDOYVk0.gif
 
@RomesFall Thanks for sharing this. There is some stuff here I really haven't thought about.

When I'm linking my pages and posts together I want to link to ones that are most closely related right? A few other threads have taught me the importance of interlinking properly. Any idea if Google treats the links in the menu differently than a contextual link within a post linking to another post on my site?

Thanks again for the info :smile:
 
@RomesFall
I actually watched that Moz video the other day, in full. The question was posed to Rand which was "Can I just create good content and magic will happen?" and he essentially said "no, you still have to do outreach because links still matter. People have to know about the content before they'll link to it."
 
@RomesFall Thanks for sharing this. There is some stuff here I really haven't thought about.

When I'm linking my pages and posts together I want to link to ones that are most closely related right? A few other threads have taught me the importance of interlinking properly. Any idea if Google treats the links in the menu differently than a contextual link within a post linking to another post on my site?

Thanks again for the info :smile:

They definitely do treat them differently, specifically there's a big difference between a link in the navigation/menu and a contextual link in the main body of text. This is because the navigation re-occurs sitewide in many instances and so the link has some value discounted and doesn't pass as much link flow because it's not as 'weighty'.

Also a actual contextual link, that's surrounded by relevant LSI Co-occurence phrases/keywords passes more link flow and thus holds more weight.

We tend to think of the most important pages being links in the navigation and this is still fine to do, but in terms of SEO it's not as valuable as it is for pure user experience. An ideal mix of both worlds is to use a page-specific navigation using server side includes or a variety of WordPress plugins that are available to do that and to still get the contextual links to important pages.
 
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