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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:
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
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.
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:
