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December 13, 2005

Blog Optimization and the Flat Directory Structure

Performancing has an interview with Google Engineer Matt Cutts today, and he reveals a few nuggets of wisdom regarding optimizing your blog to rank highly in search engines.

For me, the most interesting was the following statement he made:

"I wouldn't bother with year/month/day in blog urls; I'd just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url."

In the comments, Matt says the dates are "useless cruft to me as a user", which could indicate he simply dislikes them from a usability standpoint.

However, my read was that he was implying that Google prefers a flat directory structure - that it's not the date in itself that's the problem, but rather it's that fact that each date segment adds another directory level.

From my experience, the deeper the page, the less often it gets crawled, the longer it takes to get assigned PageRank, and the poorer it tends to rank in general. Of course, that varies with the popularity of the site, as a popular site can afford to have pages buried several directory levels deep and still do quite well. But newer or less popular sites can be putting themselves at a disadvantage.

Then there's the MSN Guidelines:

"Keep your site hierarchy fairly flat. That is, each page should only be one to three clicks away from the home page."

Of course, "clicks" are different than directory levels, but, in my opinion, a flatter directory structure is preferable. I removed dates from this blog a few months back and found that many pages were assigned PageRank where they previously had no PageRank, and a noticed slight uptick in spidering from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Hard to say whether it improved ranking or not, though, as I wasn't monitoring those pages for any particular keywords.

In the final analysis, like keywords in the URL, the ranking benefit of removing directory levels is not likely to be large enough to warrant making changes to an established site, but it's something a new site may want to consider to help it get started on the right foot.

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