Loading ...Information architecture, or site architecture, is one of the silent killers of rankings. It lurks in the background, causing lots of little issues between your site and the search engines. It’s one of those things that is easy to gloss over when you SEO.
It’s important to look at your site architecture when going through the first stages of SEO. Here are five of the more common issues encountered:
- Duplicate content. This is an issue that might surprise you, being found in an article on architecture. The usual issue discussed in relation to duplicate content is the risk it poses to your pages of being pushed off the search engines. Duplicate content can also cause issues with site architecture, in that it can confuse search engine spiders. If you have a page that is linked to through multiple URLs, you risk distracting spiders.
- Canonical issues. When you have www.example.com and example.com pointing to the same site, you have a canonical issue. Use redirects to channel traffic from minor URLs properly.
- Printing pages. A lot of sites set out print versions of their pages for the convenience of site users. These pages can distract search engine spiders, using up time that should be spent on more important content. Use your robots.txt file to instruct spiders to ignore these kinds of elements on your page.
- Infinite space issues. Sometimes, sites that use calendars and other time-reference tools inadvertently create spider traps. If a calendar on your site allows users to scan forward through the months, it’s possible that a search engine spider could follow those months on through infinity. Google’s webmasters have stated that they have figured out many ways to deal with infinite space issues, but that there is always the chance that such things could trip the spiders up.
- It’s best to deal with these if you can. Limiting the amount of future on your tools is inconvenient, but removes the problem. You can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about infinite space issues.
- Links in all the wrong places. Another incredibly common problem sites encounter is in directing search engine spiders off their pages too quickly. Spiders tend to follow links when they find them, meaning they may miss out on parts of your page if you’re not careful. There is heaps of advice on the placement of links in the SEO community, so check in with forums or your search engine optimisation consultant if you’re unsure.
- There are other things that are going to cause problems for your information architecture which are not exactly issues. For example, long tail search means lots of pages. This can mean a huge mess unless you plan your architecture very carefully. When you’re implementing a strategy involving long-tail keywords, you naturally want as many of your pages indexed as quickly as possible. Other things are likely to come up when you SEO, so it’s important to always return to the basics, plan carefully, and keep checking back.
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Tags: content, Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consult
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