Site Architecture, Canonical Links, and Redirects

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Importance of site architecture

Follow a logical structure

Similar to the foundations and structure of a house, it is extremely important that a website is structured in a logical and consistent way that search engines will find easy to crawl and understand. A clear and easy-to-follow site structure leads to a great user experience, and a great user experience usually leads to a website that ranks well. It also allows for easier crawling and indexing of the content, and better site links. 

Group related content together

Some other concepts to grasp when it comes to site architecture are that:

• Subfolders, subdomains, or separate websites can be used to group related content together. 
• Within the URLs themselves, it is important to use accurate, relevant, and descriptive keywords.

Ultimately, the goal of your site, and the architecture within it, is to drive users through to conversion in as few clicks as possible. 

Internal links 

Another concept to be aware of is internal link architecture.

Internal links are ones which go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They can help search engines identify content, understand the relationship between different pages on the same site, and pass search engine reputation from one page to another. They are commonly used in the main navigation of a site and within body text. 

Internal links are used for three main reasons:

• They enable users to navigate a website more easily.
• They help establish the information hierarchy of pages for a given website.
• They help spread authority from the home page to other content on the website. 

Link canonical elements

Link canonical elements appear in the source code of a webpage and inform search engines which URLs to index and which to ignore.  

So, we’re now going to look at link canonical elements, and some of the consequences of incorrect implementation. 

• If you haven’t set this up correctly, it might mean that good pages are unintentionally deindexed. So, if you’ve set up a canonical tag on the home page that points to another page, but that page has nothing to do with the home page, then there’s an issue there. It might mean that even the home page does not get indexed! 
• It can reduce search engine trust. Canonical tags are aimed at duplicate pages or near-duplicate pages. If Google thinks you’re using canonical tags to pass PageRank to unrelated pages, then it can lower your overall trust. 
• So, bear in mind that when you do add a canonical tag, canonical link elements pass PageRank from one page to another, which can be both an issue and an opportunity.

Working example

If we look at Marker 1, this is the page that we want Google to rank. And if we look at Marker 2, there’s a parameter “cms_admin” added to the URL. Now, we don’t want Google to index this page, so on Marker 3 we’ve added a canonical tag that points to the page that we want to have indexed. This makes it clear that there’s no duplicate content issue. And users can still visit the two different pages.

To address issues with canonical link elements:

• Manually check a web developer’s implementation of link canonical elements, especially for key SEO landing pages. And
• Quickly locate where a link canonical element is in the source code.

Redirects

If you change a web page URL or you are migrating your website to a new domain, you need to tell Google where the new pages are. The old pages will be stored in its database or index, so you can add what’s known as a redirect in your website’s backend or CMS to automatically point the user to the new web page location. For anyone performing site migrations, it’s essential to ensure that you have all redirects in place when you migrate, or it can have an extremely negative impact on your SEO. There are different ways to create URL redirects:

• In many cases, you can just get someone else to do it, like a web developer, for example. Simply ask them to put the redirects in place. 
• It might be that you can use an inbuilt tool within your CMS. WordPress has a free redirects plugin. The Yoast SEO premium plugin has a redirect feature as well. These are usually easy to implement.
• If you’re quite technical, you might like to use the .htaccess file. So, this is found on open-source websites, and it’s good for bulk redirects. But, at the same time, you need to know what you’re doing because it’s quite a technical file. So, if you get a line of code wrong you can bring a whole website down! 

When changing URLs that have not been redirected, sitewide and severe issues often happen during a site re-design or when moving from one CMS to another. To avoid such issues, a webmaster should get a list of the current URLs on the website (for example, from SFSS/GSC/AWT) and make sure they either exist on the new version of the website or that appropriate redirects are in place.