A flat site structure helps with rankings
August 30, 2006 – 10:30 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve been noticing lately that Google seems to enjoy a flat site structure. Maybe they always have, but the bias seems greater right now. I was always a big fan of stuffing the keywords in the URLs, but it seems that trick has been relegated to the dustbin, now that Tom, Dick, and even Harry are all doing it on every post.
So I went with a sitemap that points directly to all the content, using a simple numbering format. This is a common scheme in many CMS’s, so it’s hardly a unique breakthrough. The main advantage is the speed of indexing. If you’re attempting to build a really large site with a lot pages, I’d go with simple numbering over trying to go many levels deep with your pseudo-directories.
I’m not really which one is cleaner. I sort of think either way looks neat enough. It’s basically a matter of preference, but it might just be one of the 100 factors that Google looks at when it ranks your page. At the very least, if you have a great deal of content, you’re better off numbering it and linking from the sitemap, just on the basis of being spidered faster.
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2 Responses to “A flat site structure helps with rankings”
By using keywords in your post url’s, it makes it easier for the end user, albeit as you say not as good for indexing. It does come back to preference, I choose the words over numbers
By TechZ on Aug 31, 2006
I always like them too. I went crazy there for awhile, really. I had some /keyword1-keyword2/keyword1-keyword2/keyword1-keyword2.html type things going on.
But they seemingly fell out of favor for awhile. Maybe they’ll be back soon
By Darren McLaughlin on Aug 31, 2006