This week we have seen so many problems related to internal website structure that I thought this would be an important topic to discuss. If webmasters and site owners had more practical knowledge, these little issues that turn into big optimization problems could easily be avoided. We’ve decided to share this week’s top issues in hopes that those tips will help others avoid errors on their sites.

Mysite.com and www.mysite.com:

Search engines may see your website differently than you think. Check if search engines see mysite.com and www.mysite.com as the same site.

Flat Structure:
Ideally, your internal site structure should not be the same for every page on your site—especially if you have different sections on your site.

Many content management systems highlight recent content without placing much emphasis on your featured content. If you have important content, make sure that it is easy to access. Also use your site statistics to place more link weight on your most popular or most profitable content.

• Create a section related navigation that promotes other offers inside that section of your site, without heavily crossing over to other sections
• Actively guide users from within the content area of your site. These links will drive conversions and help funnel PageRank through your site
• Highlight featured content

There are many ways that a site can waste link authority:

• Printer friendly pages
• Individual post pages in forums
• Archive vs active content forum threads
• Endless cross referencing, heavy internal tagging, and user generated tags
• Other cross referencing content sections that create thousands of thin content pages

If you have thin content portions of a site or duplicate pages, get rid of them or use robots.txt to prevent them from getting indexed.

If you have more pages than link equity, you need to build links. Another thing you can do in the short term is to publish more content per page and structure your internal links to place more link weight on your most important pages.

Two more things worth considering here are to 1.) Limit template related duplication, and 2.) Temporarily publish fewer pages until you build your link authority and clean up the supplemental index issues.

Sitewide Outbound Links:
If you minimize the number of sitewide outbound links, this will keep more of your link equity flowing internally. For many sites, it does make sense to link out to resources or to sell links. If you are selling links, try to price at a higher price point and sell fewer links. This will improve your internal to external link ratio and hold your PageRank up higher.

Internal to External Link Ratio:
Make sure you have many internal links on each page. If you do not have many, perhaps you can duplicate your header navigation in your site footer.

Isolate Noisy Pieces of Your Site:
One last consideration is to isolate the noisy pieces of your site. Use subdomains to divide your content by content types. For example, if you have a great blog and add a forum to it you would probably be better by off placing the forum on a subdomain.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 3:19 am and is filed under Website issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.