Continuing from my post on nofollowing internal navigation I want to discuss, theoretically, how to design internal structures to selectively drive value. This will necessarily be a partial explanation because I am not going to cover content issues, only links structure. As such don’t throw these recommendations at your favorite site unless you are sure that you are a competent content creator. That said architectural changes have a greater possible positive effect and less chance of significant damage than nofollow schemes.

Flat Architecture

If you have been doing SEO for a while you have probably heard someone talk about flat architecture. Flat architecture is the attempt to reduce the number of levels in your link structure to the bare minimum. In small site (30-40 pages) this can mean that all pages are linked from the home page. Craigslist is a great example of flat architecture they connect all of their content to the sub-domain homepage.

E-commerce and content driven sites with hundreds of pages are going to find that linking every thing from the homepage is not effective – users will be turned away from dense blocks of links.

Flat architecture is effective in creating visibility to a great deal of content because you can use a known strong page to pass equal link value to a large number of pages. But it also becomes a barrier to growth because it is very dependent on the accumulation of links for the interior pages to hold enough link value to lift pages that are added deeper in the structure. You are expending all possible link juice immediately and hoping for outside sources to support expansion.

Pyramid Structure

One way to compensate for hierarchy needs is to build a pyramid structure:

This type of structure works well when you are receiving moderate external linking because it passes value very specifically and provides greater user connectivity than flat architecture. The important feature of this scheme is to increase interlinking as the structure becomes deeper. When you bring in external deep links you are looking for that value to primarily be passed into the deeper levels of your architecture, since you already have strong links at the higher levels.

Siloing

In the last year siloing has become a popular concept. Siloing is building a standard category hierarchy where each branch has a theme. If you need to reference information on your site across a silo you link to the category (theme) head.

Like this:

This creates very powerful category heads that can drive visibility through their branch, but it is a liability for users.

Lisa Barone uses an analogy of a site about peanut butter that tells you on one page that it goes great with a specific type of jelly, but instead of linking to that page on your site you link to the theme head page. Yes this creates a strong theme and it creates a well-linked category but it also more than triples the users’ barriers to get information. Every time that you cross-reference you have to go on this journey:

1. New category head
2. Find the referenced page
3. Visit the referenced page
4. Return to original category head
5. Find original reference point
6. Visit original reference

You don’t want to frustrate your users like this unless you are a grocery store or selling pay-per-click. Also this structure is not particularly applicable unless you have enough content to create a 10-20 page mini-site about the subject, otherwise you have to cross-link extensively and will frustrate users.

Book Architecture

The final structure that I am going to talk about today is the book architecture. A mistake many web-developers make is assuming that the web is different than the real world. Because most of the content on the web is text most everyone using the web has also used a book, or at least a magazine, so use this to your advantage. Most sites have two known strong pages — the home page and the site map. If you are treating a web-site like a book the home page should be your table of contents and your sitemap should be your index.

If all your pages link to your site map and your home page you will be consolidating link value in these two pools. Your home page acts as the major navigation and your site map acts as specific navigation to deeper pages that are not represented by your home page links. Creating two steams for link value to pass through allows pages that accumulate external links to effectively lift the value of other pages.

Any of these structural changes will affect the way that search robots and visitors access and travel your site. As sites grow larger there is a need for pragmatic changes in how concepts are implemented but most sites can be reduced to a conceptual model for linking.