Never bury your optimized content - and about styles of burying
David Rosam on Jul 24 2008 at 11:07 am | Filed under: SEO copywriting
We find it’s always desirable to place optimized content as high up in the site plan as we can - ie as few clicks away from the Home page as possible. While the search engine spiders will find the content if the site is set up correctly, the indexer may decide that the content isn’t very important because you’ve placed in a hard-to-get-at location. The result is that the page ranks more poorly than expected.
So, in such a situation, hard work spent optimizing may well not bring the returns you’re looking for.
Recently, we’ve found another wrinkle. If the pages between the Home page and the page(s) with the optimized content do not contain a reasonable amount of spiderable content (eg they contain graphics or Flash and/or little HTML-based copy), the search engines seem even more likely to ignore the optimized content located further in the site.
All this is yet another argument for planning sites with the SEO in mind. You really need to make sure all your important copy is presented in the right way to the search engines.
How is this affected by a sitemap page? Surely, with a sitemap page, the route to the optimised page would be Home -> Sitemap -> Optimised Page? [assuming that the Optimised Page is linked on the sitemap page]. Or are you describing a situation where there is no sitemap page?
@Clive Walker
I’d say that the sitemap is there to get the content properly spidered; what we’ve seen is on a site that is properly spidered according to Google Webmaster Tools.
So, I’d say spidering isn’t the issue.
The sitemap does one other thing. It shows the spiders the layout of the site, of course so with or without the sitemap, the search engines are aware of how deeply the content is buried.
That means, I think, that the sitemap has no effect on what we’ve observed.