SEO Site Architecture

SEO Site ArchitectureTomas Vaitulevicius

Rightmove

@earnedmarketing

Lessons learned whilst talking one of the top 10 UK websites, Rightmove, from the bottom of page 1 to ranking #1 for over 70% of target search terms

Google and SEO experts are promoting the idea that now SEO is all about brand building, UX, Social, PR et al. making it seem that technical SEO will take care of itself…

Google has been improving but site architecture matters and will matter for the foreseeable future.

In my experience, streamlining of our SEO architecture played a huge role in growing our SEO traffic from 1.5 million to 20 million visits a month

I see technical SEO as a multiplier – if the rest of your SEO strength factors are equal to 0, I’d focus elsewhere, but…

1,000+ pages

Incremental revenue

opportunity

100+ linking websites

…if you have some good quality content, have already gained some online authority and see further opportunity in SEO, I’m certain technical SEO can contribute to your growth

SEO Architecture Factors

Search Demand

Topic Coverage

“Destinations”

Site Sprawl / Thinness

Link Juice et al.

Crawl / Indexation Budget

The ongoing pivot of SEO towards general brand building and inbound marketing is pushing the discussion of Link Juice (and the underlying PageRank) to the fringes…

…which I find schizophrenic when Moz’s own Ranking Factor survey says that some 40% of our rank-ability depends on link related factors

“PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.”

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale HypertextualWeb Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

I also feel that the iterative nature of the PageRank algorithm is still misunderstood by our industry

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

George E. P. Box, 1987

Granted, Google has built in a lot of extra complexity into their PageRank over the years, but even the rudimentary model of Link Juice flow has got valuable lessons to teach

Home

Search

Product

Imagine we have a site with these 3 pages and links between them indicated by the arrows

Home

Search

Product

0.85

0.72

1

1

0.85

0.72

And let’s say 1 unit of Link Juice / PageRank arrives to our Homepage. Link Juice will propagate roughly as shown (this model is taken verbatim from Matt Cutt’s talk in 2009)

0.85

1

Home

Search

Product

1

0.85

However, in real life one-way link funnels, like on the previous slide, don’t exist. It’s more likely that we would have an internal linking structure like the above

0.85

0.36

1

0.36

Home

Search

Product

1

0.85

0.36

1.36

Now the 0.72 units of Link Juice previously flowing from Search page to Product page gets split and half of it goes to Homepage. This is the essence of the Iterative algorithm

0.85

0.36

1

0.36

0.31

0.31Home

Search

Product

1

0.85

0.36

1.361.67

1.16

As fresh Link Juice iterates through our architecture, decreasing with every iteration due to the ~15% dampening factor, Link Juice accumulated on our pages slowly increases

To save us from needing to calculate the iterations manually, I’ve built the simple tool above where we can set up a website and get the calculation of Link Juice growth for

our Homepage over 20 iterations of the algorithm model

http://www.earnedmarketing.com/pagerank-simulator/

After 20 iterations Link Juice accumulated on our Homepage comes up to 2.93

0.85

0.36

1

0.36

0.15

0.31Home

Search

Product

1

0.85

0.36

1.361.51

1.16

Contact

0.15

0.15

The interesting thing is that we can now modify our website setup and see what effect that has on our Link Juice flow. Let’s imagine we decided to add a Contact/Order page, and to reduce our form abandonment we removed all outbound links from this page

+42%

http://www.earnedmarketing.com/pagerank-simulator/

With the quick tweak to the setup above we find out that now only 2.06 units accumulate on our Homepage. Said differently - we could increase Link Juice on our

Homepage by 42% by replacing the Contact page with an equivalent AJAX functionality

The Perfect Setup

Traffic Potential & Topic

Coverage

Top of Class Content & Authority

First and foremost, the perfect SEO setup is a balance between our desire to cover as many topics (search terms) as possible and our ability to provide top of class content

Destinations for Topics

destination

Every topic should have a dedicated, optimized destination which matches well the underlying user intent

No Extra Destinations

or Links

All unnecessary Destinations (unique pages / URLs) and Links drain our Link Juice, consume Social and Usage metrics, eat into our Crawl / Indexation Budgets and could

contribute to our Panda risk levels

Internal Linking Architecture Proportional

to Opportunity and Competition

Finally we need internal linking architecture which helps Google find and index our Topic Destinations as well as provide them with adequate amounts of Link Juice

Real World Examples

• Referrer Parameters:

rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-49626173.html?backListLink=%2Fproperty-for-sale%2Ffind.html%3FlocationIdentifier%3DPOSTCODE%255E4274522

– HTTP Referrer

– LocalStorage

Cutting Down on Pages (Destinations)

We used to have millions of unnecessary Destinations within our architecture due to referrer being passed around via URL parameters. We now use HTTP Referrer and in

places LocalStorage. Millions of unique URLs gone from our ecosystem

• Tracking Parameters:

rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-46902629.html?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=traffic_provider

– Tracking redirect loop

– _setAllowAnchor()

Cutting Down on Pages (Destinations)

Tracking URL parameters create millions of duplicate versions of real Destinations. This can be replaced with tracking redirect loops or, in GA, with hash parameters

• Supplementary Content:

rightmove.co.uk/fees-apply.html?property_id=165467654

– Link back to the site (still potential Panda risk)

– Nofollow / disallow (burns most Link Juice)

– Noindex / canonical (consumes Crawl Budget)

– AJAX

Cutting Down on Pages (Destinations)

Supplementary information can be implemented as new Destinations. We can improve this by using “band-aids”, but we can fix this completely by moving over to AJAX

• Supplementary Functionality:

rightmove.co.uk/property-details/print.html?propertyId=47812940

– Print Stylesheet

rightmove.co.uk/addtoshortlist.html?property_id=47812940

– POST to Property with 302 Redirect

– AJAX

Cutting Down on Pages (Destinations)

Supplementary functionality can also be implemented as new Destinations, but there are much more SEO friendly ways of achieving the same user experience

• Cleaning up Footer:– iFrame + robots.txt + window.top.location.href

rightmove.co.uk/resources/search-bar.html

– We don't need them

plc.rightmove.co.uk/investors/

– Only needed on homepage

rightmove.co.uk/this-site/terms-of-use-and-privacy-policy.html

– Combining pages

Cutting Down on Links

Unnecessary links leak or divert Link Juice that should instead strengthen Topic Destinations. We considered cleaning up our footer using a blocked iFrame container, but instead used less

manipulative methods to remove tens of millions of links from our internal link graph

Breadcrumb

Nearby and Popular

Internal Linking Architecture

Breadcrumbs and “Nearby and Popular” functionality lets us provide more Link Juice to our most important Destinations and at the same time provide useful user features

SEO Architect Technical Knowledge

If you enjoy technical SEO and want to stay on top of the game. Here’s the technical knowledge you should seek to acquire on your road a “Rockstar SEO Architect” status

In closing... if your website / business model / user proposition looks like this

No amount of technical tweaking will save you

However, if you have an attractive user proposition

Investing in technical SEO can provide a great boost to your business and help you reach your full potential