Comments on: Click Distance: Site Structure And SEO

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 03:14:10 +0000

There are times when it’s hard to link to all pages. Without the sitemap on this blog for instance many of the posts would begin to fall further and further away from the main page. The sitemap was such an easy add and making those pages more accessible from the top of the site structure is no doubt helping many to rank better than they otherwise might.

By: Manish Pandey

Manish Pandey — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:36:12 +0000

Logically you are linking to all the pages from all the pages. Hence making it easily accessible to search engine bots and passing good PR to the pages, instead of passing it to all the other irrelevant pages of the categories and all.

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By: Show clear click path

Show clear click path — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 06:52:12 +0000

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By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:42:31 +0000

Absooutely. When those posts were on the main page of the blog the naturally had a lot more links pointing at them, but they were still ranking after they’d been off the main page. There are some links pointing directly to the posts themselves. The keyphrases they were being found for are not competitive and while they do have a few links they were probably ranking more for on-page factors than anything else.

And like I aid they did rank for a couple of months after not being on the main page for the blog. For awhile they were probably no more than one click from the main page, and I think now they are two clicks away. Now that I’ve placed direct links to them here it will be interesting to see if they do rank again.

They might not. The recent loss in rank could be from so many things, but I figured it was worth experimenting with to see. I’ll have to wait for Google to come back and update things, but if and when something happens I’ll be sure to post about here.

By: Yuri

Yuri — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 09:52:20 +0000

Well, the thing is that links pointing to the page are not the same with time, when it comes to blogs.

They are moved further back in to the categories and the search engines have to click and click the “Earlier entries” in each category to get to them.

Now, of course, it wouldn’t matter if there were several incoming links to the posts themselves from relevant sites, but if not, I’d expect older pages to rank a bit less.

On the other hand, we have the age factor here, so the experience will be different for two old pages, I guess.

I’d wait three months, but if you can yield results in a month, that’d be great. Considering the PR update is about, it may be possible.

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 17:17:40 +0000

The PR part of click distance is easy to see and understand and I agree with you about shortening the path being better for users. Once a search engine though had indexed a page you would think it might not matter so much though for where that page ranks. The links pointing to the page are still the same and the content on the page is still the same. If it ranked well for a query when it was one click from the home page shouldn’t it rank just as well when it’s three clicks away? Seems logical to me anyway, which is why I think this experiment is interesting.

I started my own very unscientific ecperiment here. I added a Popular Posts section to the menu for the blog. The posts there all used to rank well for a variety of long tail phrases and were consistently bringing in traffic for a few months. Not a lot of traffic by any means, but very consistent from day to day and month to month. Then recently each stopped bringing any traffic at all. Not a big loss overalll for the site, but I thought it would be interesting to see if moving them a click or two closer to the home page of the site would make a difference. They should now have a click distance of two where I think they had falled to either three or four.

Might make no difference whatsoever, but in a month or so I’ll see if those pages are back to bringing the same traffic they were a couple of months ago.

By: Yuri

Yuri — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 05:12:33 +0000

The “Click distance”, as Quadzilla put it, does play a role and it is easily explained.

The closer to the homepage, the more PR the page gets from the homepage. So unless there are a lot of links to a particular page (PR is assigned to a page, not a site), pages – or posts, for that matter – down the way will have less link weight (PR) on them.

It is important to have as many pages as close to the homepage as possible not only for the search engines, like Quadzilla may surmise, but for the visitors. The faster and easier the potential customer gets what he or she wants, the better for both of you, right?