Silo Architecture for SEO: How Deep (Crawler Leaps) is too Deep?

[goin4destiny]

Alright thank you guys so much for helping me out here! I would love to give a lil thumbs up to y'all but I don't find the button. Add that to the list of questions I am afraid to ask, but how do I like a post?

And yet another one: Silos must not be too deep, right? At what stage is it considered "too deep"? I have trouble finding a good answer for that. My URL would look something like that:

www.domain.com/category__a/subcategory_a/sub-subcategory_a/page

So three layers of category at max. That is... too deep right? From what I have heard, most recommend a depth of two categories at most. Can someone give me an educated opinion here? Thanks so much in advance, and if you're lucky, by the time you answer I will know how to like your post!

 

[Ryuzaki]

@goin4destiny, You can't like a post until you yourself have 3 posts and 3 likes under your belt. Then the ability to give likes appears at the bottom of each post.

The wisdom of not having too many sub-categories like you've illustrated comes from the days of flat file websites where you actually had to have them in subfolders and generally built the sites that way too, which meant you were creating a lot of leaps for search engine crawlers to go through. They give up after a certain number of leaps from where they start crawling.

These days, the advice against going that deep would be that it creates an unsightly URL. It can help the user to have the nested categories in the URL to a certain point, but then it becomes overwhelming too. If the purpose is to help your user navigate, then you'll be better served to do that with Breadcrumbs.

I've created sites with no categories in the URL at all but plenty of categories for real, which get shown in the breadcrumbs. I've also created sites with categories in the URL down to 2 levels. At this point in time, it doesn't really matter as long as they're clean and not too long. There's no substantial SEO benefit to having them shorter or longer. But cleaner is part of a better user interface. Rather than thinking about length, I'd urge you to think about visual cleanliness. And I wouldn't think more than 2 levels deep could provide cleanliness.

 

[goin4destiny]

@goin4destiny, You can't like a post until you yourself have 3 posts and 3 likes under your belt. Then the ability to give likes appears at the bottom of each post.

The wisdom of not having too many sub-categories like you've illustrated comes from the days of flat file websites where you actually had to have them in subfolders and generally built the sites that way too, which meant you were creating a lot of leaps for search engine crawlers to go through. They give up after a certain number of leaps from where they start crawling.

These days, the advice against going that deep would be that it creates an unsightly URL. It can help the user to have the nested categories in the URL to a certain point, but then it becomes overwhelming too. If the purpose is to help your user navigate, then you'll be better served to do that with Breadcrumbs.

I've created sites with no categories in the URL at all but plenty of categories for real, which get shown in the breadcrumbs. I've also created sites with categories in the URL down to 2 levels. At this point in time, it doesn't really matter as long as they're clean and not too long. There's no substantial SEO benefit to having them shorter or longer. But cleaner is part of a better user interface. Rather than thinking about length, I'd urge you to think about visual cleanliness. And I wouldn't think more than 2 levels deep could provide cleanliness.

That's an interesting way to look at it. Showing categories through breadcrumbs instead of the URL sounds like a cool idea, I would lose some SEO benefit by not optimizing the URL though?

Why not have my cake and eat it too? Use breadcrumbs as de facto navigation on my site yet have URLs that are up to three categories deep? That way, users can still find their way around the website and Google sees highly relevant categories displayed throughout the URL.

 

[mmm91492]

@goin4destiny Because in Google's eyes, having your cake and eating it too means getting all the benefits of a breadcrumb / virtual silo while still providing users a short, digestible URL that's easy to read and better for UX.

Getting a few extra keywords in the URL probably isn't going to make the difference compared to upping your content quality and relevance. I imagine Google's evolved far past using the URL as a major ranking factor. Down the line, an outdated SEO URL structure may even be used against you, ala the meta keywords tag, as a way to easily identify those darn rank-manipulatin' SEOs (speculation).

In short, put the extra energy into your content research and creation.