Your content structure and organization

December 11, 2007

I’ve wondered for a long time regarding the choice of some sites to build their content out within directories, sub-domains or as static pages positioned at the top of the root directory. I’ve always had it in my mind that the static page (or at least a short path to the page) is the way to go - that Google would consider that page “more relevant” because it was higher up in the directory. The answer turns out to be none of the above. To the best of my knowledge neither one has an advantage for crawling/indexing first.

What Google says:

Google has confirmed that it’s all about the content (as usual). If you have great content it can be presented within any of the above presentations. What’s important to know though is Google uses what they call “host crowding,” which restricts a domain in the listing to 1-2 appearances. They say there are some exceptions to this rule but for the most part they don’t want someone doing a search and then being presented with results that show pages from multiple sub-domains or sections of the site. From Matt Cutts:

For several years Google has used something called “host crowding,” which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen.

What we should take away from this development:

In my mind it makes sense that a search engine would treat a page more favorably if it’s named in a relevant way and positioned at the top of the directory structure but Matt does not list this as a concern. As a best practice I’m still going to follow this rule regardless. But again, if you offer great content and people link to it, this should mean that it’s worthy of a good ranking regardless of where the content is found within your site structure or how long the URL is to the content.

If you have a large site and the content is completely different use a subdomain to separate it from the main domain so as to not dilute the main content and to keep yourself organized. Ex: chairs.yoursite.com vs. tables.yoursite.com. What’s important to note when using this technique is if content from yoursite.com overlaps from one subdomain to the other, only two results will show. So, for example, if someone is searching for “kitchen furniture” and your products that fit this search are broken up between sub-domains, Google will only show two direct results. Is this a big deal? Probably not for most sites. We’ll be glad to just get the listings and allow people to browse the site further once they click the first link.

The bottom line:

The use of a sub-domain does not make it more likely you’ll get multiple listings in the search results and they’re use does not hurt your potential ranking either (for most sites). If you have a large site, feel free to break up the content as you need to keep yourself sane. For smaller sites, keep it simple and place your pages in the main directory of your main domain. Just make sure you write great content and build your site so the resulting pages are highly relevant to your target audience and you’ll be well positioned.