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Saturday, December 28, 2024

Why Google Recommends Hierarchical Site Structure For SEO - Search Engine Journal

Last updated Saturday, December 23, 2023 09:02 ET , Source: NewsService

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Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about site structure, explaining why a hierarchical site structure is good for SEO and when it’s okay to use a flat site structure.

Gary offers a good reason why a hierarchical site structure is a good choice and why the flat site structure is okay for simple websites.

Flat Site Structure

A flat site structure is when every page has a link from the home page, thus every page is one click away from the home page.

It’s called a flat structure because if the linking structure were visualized it would be flat, with everything all linked together on one level beneath the home page.

The flat site structure came about during a time when people used to obtain links from web directories and from reciprocal linking (where two sites agree to link to each other).

That kind of link building created massive amounts of links to the home page but not so much to the inner pages. What SEOs to maximize how much PageRank was distributed across the website was to create the flat structure which distributed PageRank down to every page, giving every page the maximum ability to rank better during a time where high PageRank pages tended to rank better.

Not long after that strategy was invented Google dampened the influence of PageRank as a ranking factor so that sites with lower...



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