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I'm using the Category module to organize the navigation on a site I'm working on. Some of the content is deeply buried because of the way the hierarchy is structured. I've read it is not good practice to have any content buried 3 clicks away from the homepage, however it is necessary because of the way this site is structured. As an example a post might be made in the following category:
Computers/Systems/Laptops/Dell/Inspiron/E1405
So after a user has navigated to the category "E1405" then the content is available. And of course the content is available as a teaser on all categories preceding it. Let's say somebody writes a review of this laptop. My question is, in terms of good SEO practice does it matter if I have the content posted as follows:
localhost://Computers/Systems/Laptops/Dell/Inspiron/E1405/E1405_Review
Or would it be better to have the node posted as follows:
localhost://E1405_Review
Will it make any difference whether or not the content is indexed by search engines if it is buried deep in a URL or not?
Also, might the site be penalized if the same teaser is showing up in multiple categories in the navigation scheme?
Comments
I think that search engines
Don't really care how deep anything is, although PEOPLE like to get what they want very quickly.
I have seen comments elsewhere to the affect that renamed URLs are a cause of server overhead on large sites that use them widely.
Look at VIEWS Module - this will allow you to give people structured searches.
Eg in your main menu I select Laptops.
Then I as a user go to a VIEW which offers a few visible Selection Filters (and has a preseletected invisible of "type - laptop) - Mfr - Price range - weight - speed - screen size and this allows me to broadly define my interests, and presents me with ones that fit.
Ian Dickson - community specialist.
Including more information is better for SEO.
localhost://Computers/Systems/Laptops/Dell/Inspiron/E1405/E1405_Review < this string is pretty good SEO wise. Much better than the other. Also, customizing your theme coding to use header tags etc... will help a lot as well. See the SEO group on groups.drupal.org and ask questions there and you're likely to get a good response. Hope this helps!
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Down under
In general I agree, but in my experience Google ranks pages closer to the root higher than those deep in subdirectories.
I have to agree here. This
I have to agree here. This gives you more "keyword" type urls than just a direct link and allows for better organisation.
Granted its longer for the end user but most won't remember an url anyway, just the base path.
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SEO, category module & depth
Category module gives you SEO potential that nobody has shown me Taxonomy can do. This all stems from a category page being a node. I'm sticking with Category module for this reason even though it just failed to handle the upgrade to 4.7.3, just like this problem here:
http://drupal.org/node/81507
To your question: Here is the dope on hierarchy and SEO:
The fewer clicks from your home page to a page, the better that page will do on G & co. Here's why:
* A large part of a page's performance at SEs is based on inbound links. Links give 'link power', 'link juice' or Google Page Rank, call it what you like.
* A page passes on its link juice via outbound links. That juice is shared amongst all the sites linked to.
* Inbound links from other sites are usually more important and potentially more numerous than internal links.
* Most inbound links come to the home page so the home page is the source of most link power on most sites.
* So a home page's link power is spread around a site via links from the home page and each click reduces the amount of juice received and therefore how well a page will do on G.
So pages many clicks away from the home page have to work really hard to do well.
Notice I say 'clicks' not hierarchy. The two may correspond but they don't have to. You can build manual menus or lists or site maps that reduce the number of clicks a search engine spider needs to take to get to a page (this is all about spiders, not users).
The implications of this are widespread and rarely taken on by site builders. The results of which is that most large sites effectively bury huge portions of their content, slowly killing it as far as search engines are concerned.
If you start building new flat navigation structures for spiders, remember that G recommends no more than 100 links on a page. But you can push this to 200 if you have to.
Hope all this helps, I'll be expanding on it and everything 'SEO and Drupal' soon.
great advice
lovely summary. i hope you will expand on this as promised. consider writing a handbook page or two here on http://drupal.org/handbook.
SEO
Yes it makes a difference, just like described by marknunney.
No, that's no problem. Otherwise huge sites would all be penalized, because a lot of them use this technique.
As mentioned before, it would be good if the "deep content" would be accessible on your front page or at least only one or two clicks away.
Google will index your front page and then (if there are deep links) send a deep crawl bot, that indexes all pages that are linked on the front page.
SEO
Thanks everybody! Good information here. So it looks like it would be good to build a sitemap with direct lnks to the main content so it is only 2 clicks away. Actually the hierarchy structure makes it easier for the user, since all of the content is being filtered down through the categories, gets more specific as one navigates further and the teasers are clickable. Not so good for the search engine though. I'll have to take a look at the Google sitemap module.
There are going to be a bunch more than 200 content items once I start getting content in. If Google only recommends 100 to 200 links, is it possible to build multiple sitemaps? Or perhaps I should build a mini-sitemap for each main category that lists links to all the content in the category.
By the way, I just converted all of the _ underscores to - hyphens, since I read that Google prefers the hyphen. I think semantically I like underscore better because it more accurately represents a space, but I don't like the idea of it sabotaging search results. Perhaps the pathauto default separator should be changed to hyphen.
Glad I'm thinking about all while in the process of building the site. Any other tips would be appreciated and I'll post them as I find them.
http://www.undoITsolutions.com
Make that one click
Sorry I only have a moment. With just 200 pages, with a little imagination, you should be able to link to them all from your home page and from every page. Which is ideal. No room to grow though.
You don't need a site map with so few pages although it will do no harm. Direct links to 200 pages aside, the main route offered to spiders can be your category pages.
sitemap
If you use the google sitemap module, there is no problem with using more than 200 links.
"Dont stuff more than 100-200 links on a page" means that you should not put more than 200 links onto one page (not onto one entire website - which is normal).
The underscore/hyphen issue: Right now google's stemming has gotten better, maybe the difference between _ and - will be gone soon.
I would not change the presettings of autopath, it's okay like this.
Definitely hyphens not underscores
Try searching Google with "site_map" (drop quotes) and then "site-map" and you'll instantly see that the underscore is treated as a character, the hyphen as a space.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site-map has over 500 million results and top results are almost all about 'site map' and 'sitemap'
http://www.google.com/search?q=site_map has just over 3 million and top results are all about 'site_map'.
WARNING: don't go changing all your currently indexed URLs from underscores to hyphens. This requires a 301 premanent redirect from old to new and even then you might lose traffic for a month.
this is nice
this is nice posting
*********88
jockben
Link Building
Hyphen vs. Underscore
Here is an old post from Matt Cutts on hyphen vs. underscore which is still relevant:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
Site maps, home pages, category pages and link juice
Almost there undoIT. I'll try and clarify a few things:
Yes, a site map can link to 1-200 pages and that's fine. If you're site is big those pages might be category pages that each link to 1-200 pages. Etc, etc. On a big site, you might use extra menus to link directly (from the home and every page) to important category pages (or "main content") that would otherwise be too deep.
But a site map only has the link power of the pages linking to it. Your home page likely has the most link power and your site map is likely one click away from your home page. So subsequent pages are 2 clicks away. So don't rely on your site map to give search engines (SEs) the quickest route from your home page to every page. For that:
* start your site navigation from your home page
* link to as much as possible from your home page
Hence, if you have less than 200 pages, link to them all from your home page.
You and others mention Google Site maps which are a whole other thing. Fine, but a G site map doesn't create any significant link power (and what about Yahoo and MSN?). It wont make pages perform any better. All it can do for you that a 'real' site map or (better still) 'real' navigation can do, is get pages indexed that poor site navigation failed to get indexed.
Real site maps and G site maps are supplements to a site navigation optimised for search engines.
You mention how helpful category pages can be to SEs but then go on to say "not so good for the search engine though". Flip that around: perfect for search engines. Category pages can be your best performing pages on SEs.
You can link to category pages and "main content" (your phrase) from your home page and every page. Category pages can be very optimised for search engines (especially if you can treat like them like a node as you can with Category module and thereby add copy and control the page title and description metatag). After your home page, expect 'cat pages' to be your most successful on SEs. Also, category pages can help optimise the pages they link to.
When you "converted all of the _ underscores to - hyphens", did you do a 301 redirect from all your old URLs to new? If not, you might lose traffic as you confuse the SEs and they try and sort out what's going on. But this is another subject, summary: if you change a page's URL, you need to do a 301 permanent redirect (not a 302). If pages aren't yet indexed (search with site: ), no problem.
Changing underscores to hyphens and pathauto update url aliases
The site I'm working on is currently on a production server. All I did to change the underscores to hyphens was empty all the data for url_alias in mySQL. I then had pathauto recreate all the aliases. This is very useful for updating paths on a production server, but it wouldn't work on a live site. Another time this comes in handy is if you have moved categories around. Pathauto does not automatically update the paths for subcategories.
I've run into a problem with this particular site I'm working on. Because there are so many categories and so many levels of hierarchy, the performance becomes very slow. This seems to be related to the Category module. I ran devel module and noticed that cache_set is eating up a bunch of time when adding new categories. For some reason it is querying every single category on the site each time a new category is added. I'm not sure if this is an inefficiency in the Category module but it has brought this project to a standstill for now. It is taking 20 seconds or more to add each new category, it really eats up the CPU and it is getting progressively slower. Adding new content is pretty zippy. I am curious if this is an inefficiency in the Category module or if i is just need to rethink my hierarchy to optimize performance.
There is a lot to consider before continuing with this site. I began thinking that I could have each Main category on a separate subdomain and separate install of Drupal. But then there is the problem of integrating authentication and user-login for each separate subdomain. If each main category is on a separate subdomain it would mean less clicks to get to the content. On the backburner for now.
http://www.undoITsolutions.com
You are running the Drupal
You are running Drupal 4.7, are you? As I remember category handling has been optimized in this version.
Would appreciate SEO tips and comments....
I have recently rolled out a Drupal site - Home Security Guru.
I installed and configured nodewords, and am using clean urls.
Would any of the SEO guys here care to have a quick look at my website and give me some useful tips?
Thanks!
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Dominic Ryan
www.iis-aid.com
You might want check out our
You might want check out our recent blog post
Drupal and SEO a good combination
Some of the modules and ideas have already been mentioned but a couple haven't.
Tim
Venture Skills
IT & New Media company
Visit our blog at wordpress.com
or our main site www.venture-skills.co.uk
Drupal SEO
Here's some more related reading for anyone interested in Drupal SEO: http://blamcast.net/articles/drupal-seo
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