In this article, I will tell you about the difference between flat and deep architecture in SEO. It is one of the most important factors which determine the ranking of the webpages on your website. Google prioritizes web pages or, blog posts according to architecture.
A website can have 100 pages or, 1000 pages or, more. We are trying to represent the effect of flat vs deep architecture in SEO. You need to set your goal. Therefore, you can arrange the web pages according to your plan. You need to give a message to Google that this page is most important. And this page is less important.
Table of SEO Contents
You can click on each topic to visit the desired part of the article-
- What is Content Hierarchy?
- What is Flat Architecture in SEO?
- What is Deep Architechture in SEO?
- Difference Between Flat and Deep Architecture
What is Content Hierarchy?
It simply means how the web pages are arranged on the homepage. It also means the grouping of the web content. You can use some categories to make this grouping. There may be some subcategories on the main categories.
And the blog posts are under the category, subcategory, or, without any category. Google considers the whole link structure of a website. It indicates which content is the most important and which one is less important.
If you place a great article at the bottom of the hierarchy, you can’t expect it to rank better(except it has some good quality inbound links).
What is Flat Architecture in SEO?
A type of link architecture of a website where people can easily reach the last article in 2/3 clicks from the home page. It is very useful for a new website that does not have a huge number of articles.
The architecture is popular and effective for the SEO of a website. If your website has thousands of articles and all are available on the homepage it is an unexpected practice.
Google may decrease the ranking of that site or, may penalize. Beware of that, and make your website architecture user-friendly. This is the best practice until users get annoyed.
You can monetize your free WordPress blog with affiliate links. The link architecture on a free WordPress blog(i mean something.wordpress.com) is flat in most cases.
What is Deep Architecture in SEO?
A type of link architecture where people can’t easily reach the end of the hierarchy of articles or. web content. Visitors need to click more than 2/3 times to reach the end of the web page, or, we can say to reach the article.
You can use a menu, categories, subcategories, and more sub categories to arrange the content of your website. In that case, the content at the end of the hierarchy will take more time to be indexed and ranked on Google.
This type of link architecture is suitable for big websites like Wikipedia, Quora, etc.
Read More About- Keyword Stuffing
Difference Between Flat and Deep Architecture in SEO
Both types of architecture are essential for two different types of websites. For small websites, Flat architecture works better. And for a big website with a huge amount of content deep link architecture is suitable.
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| Area of Comparison | Flat Link Architecture | Deep Link Architecture |
| Possibility To Index Fast | Yes | No |
| SEO Friendliness | For Small Number of Articles | For a Large Number of Articles |
| Easy To Discover Content | Yes | No |
| Possibility To Rank High Competition Keywords | Lower | Higher |
| Possibility To Rank Low Competition Key-phrase | Higher | Lower |
| User Friendliness | Best At First Glance | Best for Deeply Interested Users |
| Best Practice For Bloggers | Micro Niche Blog | Broad Niche Blog |
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Google bot crawl links from page to page. So, it takes more time to reach all the links in deep architecture. But, at the end of the day, better contents rank better in Google searches.
We are talking about internal link architecture. You can use inbound link checker tool to check the backlinks. And take necessary steps according to your SEO strategy as well.
It is suggested by SEO experts that Google does not crawl more than 100 links per page. So, you should not keep a large number of links on a single page. User experience is the key to all SEO practices. So, both flat and deep link architecture can work for SEO if it is user-friendly.
Questions & Answers:
What are the disadvantages of too deep architecture?
In a too-deep architecture, the visitors find it difficult to reach the end of the link hierarchy. The search engine crawlers also find the articles later. Therefore, it takes a very long time to rank all the pages.
What is considered a good site architecture?
Keep the related web pages together, making it easier for the users to find all the pages. And at the same time maintain the hierarchy of the pages according to their importance.
Does site structure really affect SEO?
Of course, it does affect SEO. Google or, bing search engines categorize the pages according to their importance. If you put a less important page on top of the hierarchy by mistake. The search engines may give more importance to that page instead of important pages.
