What do you feel is the best structure for a website in terms of search engine visibility? I have always taken to the silo approach using folder hierarchy but I came across this website http://www.hobbytron.com that appears to have every page on the site at the 1st level. It does very well in the SERP's for many of their pages and I wanted to get some opinions of their site structure. I wasn't sure if this post would be better suited for the web design forum or this one so I have cross posted there as I would like opinions from both segments. Admins, if this is against policy please let me know and I will delete one of the posts. Thanks, Joshua.
Personally I prefer a pyramid approach. I think linking to every page from the 1st level is a bad practice. Although hobbytron seems to do well, you would have to dig into their backlinks. They might do a really good job of building external links to each important internal page. This link building may offset negative aspects of their site architecture. When you have so many links on each page, the search engines may not be able to crawl and index all of those pages. It also forces your internal PR to be evenly spread out over far too many pages.
I agree 100% w/ vansterdam. I'm a BIG fan of Theme Pyramid-based sites as described by Brett Tabke in the 4th post on the this WebmasterWorld thread or silo-based sites. I think having every page on the site link to every page on the site is poor way to direct not only the flow of PR, but relevance as well. Using theme pyramids, your site naturally ends up with relevant pages linking to relevant pages.
Upon further inspection it does appear there are a lot of deep links going in so maybe that is the primary reason for the good rankings and not the flat structure. Looking at the backlinks it looks like they created another site which is essentially duplicate (hobbytron.net) and have been building links to that and in turn deep linking back to hobbytron.com. I would imagine Google would not be hip with that. If anyone else has time to dig into this site and report on what they think is working and what is not working this could make for an interesting study. I'd also like you're opinion on this massive sitemap hobbytron.com/big_sitemap.html. Seems to me that would appear spammy. In the cross posted thread it was suggested that they may be using rewrites to appear that way.
fyi.. I started this thread after reading the articles below and looking into the sites in question. The articles must be outdated as hobbytron now outranks heliguy for the mentioned term. Kind of funny cuz this guy uses these articles as part of his email drip lessons still. seo2020.com/lsi/website-theme.html seo2020.com/lsi/theme-bleeding.html