Another SEO professional asked if John Mueller could comment on flat hierarchy vs. strict URL hierarchy.
Because there is no such thing as “closer to the homepage” with a flat structure.
John explained that for Google, they don’t care so much about the folder structure. They really focus on the internal linking.
And the focus is also on the links from the homepage, not links to the homepage.
So from that point of view, if you have a URL structure that doesn’t have any subdirectories at all, Google will still see that structure based on the internal linking.
And a lot of times, the architecture of the site is visible in the URL structure, but it doesn’t have to be the case.
Just looking at the number of slashes, for example, in the URL doesn’t tell us that this is lower level or higher level.
It’s really about – “From the home page, or primary page, how quickly can Google reach a specific page”?
And that’s still just that one part that plays into optimizing this from a page rank calculations perspective.
This happens at approximately the 18:11 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 5 18:11
Can you comment on flat hierarchy versus strict kind of URL hierarchy? Because there’s no such thing as closer with a flat structure.
John 18:28
How do you mean by…I guess.
SEO Professional 5 18:33
Well, closer to the homepage can be the number of clicks to get to the page you want on the homepage. Or it can mean sections of the URL, if you’ve got a strict hierarchy in the URL.
John 18:46
Oh, okay. Yeah.
SEO Professional 5 18:47
Whereas if it’s flat, then there’s no such thing as closer to the homepage, because they’re all under one folder structure.
John 18:54
Okay, yeah. For us, we don’t care so much about the folder structure, we really essentially focus on the internal linking. And it’s also kind of like links from the homepage, not links to the homepage. So from that point of view, if you have a URL structure that doesn’t have any subdirectories at all, we still see that structure based on the internal linking.
And a lot of times the kind of the, I don’t know, the architecture of the website is visible in the URL structure, but it doesn’t have to be the case. So just looking at the number of slashes, for example, in a URL doesn’t tell us that this is lower level or higher level.
It’s really like from the homepage or from the primary page how, how quickly can we reach that specific page?
And that’s, that’s, like still just that one part where we kind of say, well, within the general page rank calculations, kind of that plays in there. But it’s like the other stuff also still plays in, where it’s like how often we think a page will actually change.
