Optimizing site structures through diverse navigation

Carlos Delrio has some interesting things to say about using NoFollow to game Google on your internal linkage. Towards the end of the article, he writes:

What you should be doing is constructing sites that better distribute linkage to deep pages. This includes selectively restricting navigation through the site, use of robot.txt and meta robots tag to restrict indexing, and use of hub points. Also you should be focusing on your content — if you are having trouble with visibility you probably are not creating focused content.

Those administrative links that everyone is so quick to shut off do not actually need to be on every page, they can be given a category like any other content and not an individual site wide link. This will drastically decrease the total linkage to the section. Additionally contact pages, about us, terms of service, etc. don’t need to link to all areas of your site they can easily their value only to logical hub points – like category heads or site maps.

Carlos mentoned my personal site, Xenite.Org, which often ranks for competitive expressions with minimal effort, as an example of how a large content site can be organized. Now, Xenite ranks highly for many expressions for a variety of reasons, one of which is that other sites do link to Xenite with friendly (but unsolicited) anchor text. Still, Xenite.Org started out as something other than a mega site.

I originally had four Web sites on four domains and in early 1997 I decided to consolidate my content on one domain. However, at the time I kept each site separate and distinct. That is, I set up Xenite like it was a small Web hosting domain and the root URL didn’t really matter.

Although someone eventually told me to create an index page for the root URL to give curious eyes something to gaze at other than my server’s directory structure, Xenite.Org has effectively functioned as a collection of separate, distinct Web sites ever since. Only in the past few years have I been attempting to homogenize the sites’ look and feel.

One of the lessons I learned early on, though, was to cross-promote content. Web site A could tell people about Web site B, and people inevitably began following those links. So did the search engines, of course. But as Xenite grew larger managing the growing collection of separate sites, designs, and internal structures became more complex. Some sections of Xenite.Org are actually NOT under my direct control any more. I’ve turned them over to my partner, who is a better Web designer than me. And that is true of the larger Xenite network, which now encompasses several domains. You can usually tell which domains are the ones I personally administer in about 3 seconds.

Operating 50 Web sites under one domain taught me there is power in numbers. It also taught me that creating distinctive content sections for different audiences brings in a very diverse selection of people. Someone will always click on one of those cross-promotional links because, even if they are there to satisfy a craving for cheese dip they may still be a Grace Park fan or maybe they love Tolkien.

The surprising thing I realized one day was that diverse site architecture doesn’t really have anything to do with size. It’s all about topicality. Whether you have 50 pages or 500 or 5 million pages, you need to organize your content so that people can find the related topics quickly and easily, but also so that they can find the unrelated topics just as quickly and easily.

You don’t do that through a unified navigation system. You do that through diverse navigation systems. There are only a handful of pages on Xenite.Org that all the other pages link to. You can now get to the root URL and the HTML sitemap pages from just about anywhere on Xenite. Every other section belongs to one of several supercategories of topics.

A supercategory has a free-flowing navigational system that you develop through your cross-promotional links. Your internal navigation tells people (and search engines) which pages are most important to you, but your cross-promotional navigation tells people (and search engines) that you have other content. It’s intra-site advertising that search engines don’t mind following and indexing.

Xenite’s primary navigation (at least on the more modern pages — the domain is never fully updated because I’ve never converted it to a CMS-driven display) includes those must-have links to the root URL and sitemaps. A secondary nearly site-wide navigation system is Xenite’s Javascript-driven banner ad network. Nearly all the ads are for other content in Xenite’s network. We occasionally run special promotions (at no cost) for charities, celebrities who have large fan communities in our network, or people I just want to help. The Javascript embeds all use NoScript sections to ensure that visitors see something that looks like a banner ad (again, it only promotes a Xenite destination).

Many pages, nearly all of them in fact, also include “local navigation” or “section navigation”. These are the menu links we provide to help people move through specific sections. Every page in the White Cheese Dip site links to every other page in the White Cheese Dip site, and so on.

Finally, some pages also carry cross-promotional links — links that tell our visitors about related content elsewhere on Xenite.Org or in the Xenite network. These links are usually presented in a uniform style so that visitors become accustomed to seeing them and thus know the links really do promote similar or related content. We often link to our forums and F.A.Q. documents with such links. We’ve also relied upon them extensively for promoting our poster store pages (currently dormant because I’m getting out of the poster affiliate business). I decided years ago that competing for search placement in poster queries was just not worth the time and effort.

Every new site design upgrade retains this four-part navigation model: sitewide navigation, section navigation, banner navigation, cross-promotional navigation. That limits what we can do with basic page layouts in some ways, although the more recent template (that has only been propagated across approximately 50% of Xenite’s pages) is more attractive than past Xenite designs. You can thank my partner for finding the template, but I’m not happy with how long it takes pages to render.

Multiple in-site navigation systems is the only way to ensure that every section of a complex Web site achieves sufficient search visibility while making it easy for people to get around the site. I’ve spent years fighting to keep links OFF our pages as I’ve added more pages and more links to the navigation systems. The latest design (not yet visible on our root URL but you can see a variation of it on our Huckleberry Products site) seems to be a reasonable compromise between the users’ need to navigate and my need to tell them where to find more content.

I even found a placement for Google AdSense that doesn’t make the pages look ugly and our revenue hasn’t dropped off that much. So Xenite is undermonetized but it is well-linked internally and achieves good coverage in search results for a couple hundred expressions with only a couple thousand pages of content (most of the content was moved to other domains years ago).

By looking at in-site navigation as a series of components rather than as a single, monolithic architecture, I don’t have to worry about whether my pages are getting indexed. Some pages drop out of the indexes from time to time but there are sufficient links to ensure that they’ll all return sooner or later.

The bottom line is this: you get more bang for your buck by telling people (and search engines) WHERE to find your content, not by trying to run them in circles in an effort to manipulate something you cannot even measure.