Today i have a question about website structuring.
I would like to know how Google sees a sites structure, do they count per click from link to link to see how many pages they had to go through to get to your content or is it all URL based?
Let me explain a bit more:
let say i have a “home”,“category” and “product” page.
the “category” page is structured as follows:
Page1:
food & drink
construction
then if you click on food & drink you get page2:
pubs
clubs
after you click on pubs you will get all the pubs.
now what i want to know is:
Does Google see the structure as,
“home” example.com
“cateogry” example.com/category
“cateogry” example.com/category
“product” example.com/category/product
does Google go…ok that was 3 click to get to the “product” page so that is a tree deep structure or do they look at the URL and say you are two deep because you have got /category/product
If anyone has a idea on how this works please let me know, thanks for reading!!!
I suspect exactly how google and other search engines analyse structure is a closely guarded secret. However, as in your example, a home - category (with pagination if applicable) - single entry structure is a pretty standard way of structuring content, Google knows this, the actual URL structure isn’t that important but having /category/blah is an obvious method - it could even be /something/else but that would not stop engines crawling the site. The best rule of thumb is to create a URL structure that humans can easily understand.
As for counting the number of clicks it takes to find a piece of content I wouldn’t worry about it, what’s is far more important is how easy you make it for your sites visitors to find what they are looking for.
In my opinion the search engines are far more interested in individual pages than how your site is structured.
In the past I have had pages that are first in the search results for the relevant keywords and other pages linked to those ones that are so far down the rankings I didn’t bother looking far enough to find them.
