What Laziness Taught Me About the Importance of Flat Architecture

N.B. This post is intended for relatively new SEOs with smaller sites.  Intermediate and advanced SEOs probably already know most of this information, and I do not claim to have experience with sites numbering thousands of pages, for which different strategies are surely more effective.

Some of you may know that I run an NCAA basketball website in my spare time from November thru April.  Up until about three weeks ago, I ran the site entirely with static, hand-coded HTML pages.  (Needless to say, a conversion to a CMS was long overdue.)  

This year we posted Team Profiles for over 40 teams who made the NCAA Tournament field, and it was impossible for me to keep up with linking to them from everywhere they should have been, like the author’s bio page, sitemap, etc.  So, I wound up with 40+ pages that were ONLY linked from the homepage, which at the time had a PageRank of 4.

Screenshot of homepage ~ 04/01/07.  Links to Team Profile pages are denoted by light gray backgrounds.  Google, in case you’re wondering, that’s an EDITORIAL link to TicketCity!

Over the summer, I was L-A-Z-Y and didn’t edit the site to cross-link those new pages throughout the site as I should have.

But lo and behold, when I went to 301 redirect those pages to their new Wordpress counterparts a few weeks ago, I noticed that a significant percentage (60%?) of these 40 pages had also accrued a PR of 4, the same rank as the homepage.  The remaining profiles (40%?) had accrued a PageRank of 3.  These are for pages that had NO other inbound links, other than from the Bracketography homepage.

I am well aware that PageRank ≠ SERP Rank, but this unexpected phenomenon has led me to the following strategy.

Best Practice Site Architecture for Small Websites, v2.0

You hear it all the time at introductory SEO sessions – “Keep your site architecture flat, so the spiders don’t have to crawl through multiple levels of links to get to a particular page.”  Well, folks, I’m recommending in this post that you make your architecture flat as a pancake.  True, it’s not as valid semantically, nor as useful for usability, but those homepage links are INCREDIBLY important for SEO purposes.

For the average small website, almost all of your link juice / PageRank will naturally accrue first to your homepage, from which it is filtered to your sub-pages via your site's hierarchy.  (The exception is for sites with a lot of linkbait-y content, where there are a ton of links pointing directly at that content.)

See the diagrams below for the modification of traditional SEO strategy that I am suggesting.  This flat-as-a-pancake strategy should be even MORE ammunition to use against designers who want to incorporate a splash page.

As I stated at the beginning of this post, this modification only holds true for smaller sites.  Larger sites would confuse visitors and run out of screen real estate if they were to use this strategy.  

Why I Recommend This for Smaller Sites: A Theory of Homepage Link Value

Most experts in the field feel that search engines typically use an algorithm along the lines of

  .85 * (1/x)

in determining the value of a link, where x is the number of links on a page (i.e., the more links you have on a page, the less juice each link will pass).  See Sergey & Larry’s famed original paper on PageRank.

The 85% at the front of the expression is what’s known as a damping factor, to ensure that the amount of link juice passed from truly unimportant pages on the web eventually approaches zero.  And of course, Google has stated explicitly that its bot typically doesn’t follow more than 100 links on a page.

But in my experience, if one is talking about a homepage link, the algorithm might look something closer to

.95 * (3/x)

Notably, I think:

• The damping factor is lower (note that the # itself is actually higher, but the % of damping is lower)
• The number of links on the page does not affect the value of an individual link as much (Google knows that homepages by their nature have to get people to different parts of the site quickly)

Yes, this strategy has the potential to devalue your homepage slightly, if you include SO many links that your juice bleeds away too rapidly.  But as long as your individual pages are well-optimized with good titles and headers, they should have a better chance than your homepage at showing up in the SERPs anyway, even with a slightly lower PageRank. 

Has anyone else seen this kind of strategy either succeed or fail on their own site(s)?

Bonus Tip: If you’re new to SEO, you may not know that another way to funnel your link juice to the pages you'd like to rank well is to use "rel=nofollow" on links to pages you have no desire to rank (like your privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.).  In an interview with Rand awhile back, Matt Cutts said this is perfectly legitimate – see answer #2.

David Mihm is a small business SEO + website designer based on the U.S. West Coast.