Make your site easier to navigate – Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide User Manual
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Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide, Version 1.1, 13 Nov 2008, latest version at
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Provide one version of a URL to reach a document - To prevent users from linking to one
version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that
content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and
internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content
through multiple URLs, setting up a
from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL
is a good solution for this.
Avoid:
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having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. "domain.com/
page.htm" and "sub.domain.com/page.htm") accessing the same content
•
mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure
•
using odd capitalisation of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and
remember them better)
Make your site easier to navigate
The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content that they want. It can
also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important. Although Google's
search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays
in the bigger picture of the site.
All sites have a home or "root" page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the
navigation starting place for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, you should
think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific
content. Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area so that it would make sense to create a
page describing these related pages (e.g. root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Do you
have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory
pages?
The directory structure for our small website on baseball cards