Site Optimization: More Key Points to Remember - Information Architecture and Duplicate Content
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The way your site’s links are set up can help you in the search engine rankings. Think about the sites you have visited. Which ones were easiest for you to use? What did they have in common? If you want your website to have an effective information architecture, you want to consider the factors that make it most usable to your human visitors. These features will help the search engine spiders find their way as well.
This is one reason it makes sense to create and use a sitemap on your website. You want your sitemap page linked to from every other page on the site. If your site is large, you at least want important high-level category pages and the home page to link to the sitemap. A web surfer looking at your sitemap should see links to all of your site’s internal pages; also, by the way you set up the sitemap, you can give a visitor a clear conceptual idea of your site’s structure.
If your site is very large (more than 100-150 pages), you may not want to link to every page on your sitemap. You can link to all of the category level pages instead, which in turn link to all of the pages in that category. In this way, no page in a site is more than two clicks away from the home page. If your site is exceptionally large, you may need to set it up so that no page is more than three clicks away from the home page.
Speaking of your site’s category structure, it should be set up so that it flows from broad topics to more narrow, specific ones. This tells the search engines that your site covers a topic in depth. It is much more likely, then, that they will consider your site to be highly relevant to your keywords and phrases.
Finally, let me address the issue of duplicate content. This comes up for larger, dynamic websites powered by databases. Search engines want to index unique content; when they find pages which contain the same content, they will probably choose one as “canonical” to display in the search results, and quite possibly ignore the rest.
This could easily happen to your site if you have a content management system that creates duplicate content through separate navigation to pages. This reduces the chances of those pages ranking well in the SERPs. Multiple versions of the same content also dilute the value you get out of anchor text and link weight, through both internal and external links to the page.
To solve this problem, you first need to find all your duplicate pages. Once you have that information, take those pages and do a 301 re-direct to point them to the “canonical” version of the appropriate content. By all means, don’t ignore your home page when you do this! Many sites have the same content on http://www.mywebsite.com, http://mywebsite.com and http://www.mywebsite.com/index.html. That damages the rankings for your own home page, a problem you can fix with a 301 re-direct.
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