A practical article detailing how to identify (and fix!) pages that are buried on your site.

The Problem

One way to improve your site's performance in the search engine is to address buried pages on your site. By buried pages, I mean pages that are less frequently referenced, harder to get to, and not often linked to. These pages are viewed as less important to the search engines for – they're not a prominent part of your site and there isn't much internal link juice flowing to them. Sometimes this is OK – for instance, if the pages aren't important or have little to no opportunity to bring in search traffic (e.g. a page that listed the terms and conditions for a one-time contest). Many times, however, these pages were simply overlooked when designing the site and represent an opportunity to improve rankings and grab some additional traffic from the search engines.

The Solution

First we'll identify problem pages using a free program called Xenu Link Sleuth and Microsoft Excel (the free Open Office works too!), then I'll give suggestions for how to create a plan to fix them. You can get Xenu Link Sleuth at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html – while the site is a bit ugly & outdated the tool itself is invaluable.

Identifying Problem Pages

Assuming you have Xenu installed, the first step will be to crawl your site. Go to File -> Check URL…, type your homepage URL in the first field, then hit OK. Xenu will spider your site and collect all sorts of useful information that you can use to troubleshoot your site.

After crawling your site it will ask if you want to run a report – we'll say no. Instead, we want to do File -> Export to TAB separated file… Save the file, then open that file in Excel. It should look something like this:

This is a lot more data than we need for this exercise. The next step is to distill this down into only the information we need. Delete all the columns except for Address, Type, Level, and Links In. Your spreadsheet should now look something like this:

We're only concerned with pages on our site, yet this list shows everything – images, scripts, pages, pdfs, etc. So the next step is to sort the Type column A-Z to clump everything together by file type, then delete everything except for text/html.

After that we sort by Address A-Z to clump everything together by domain, and delete all the pages that aren't on our site. Once this is all done, you should have a list of all the html pages on your site, their level, and links in – and nothing else.

And, just to keep things clean, we can now delete out the Type column, since we know everything that's left is text/html:

Identifying Pages Deep in the Site

There's two pieces of data that we'll use to troubleshoot this specific issue. The first is page depth. Page depth is how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to this page – your homepage itself will show 0 in this column. 1 would mean it's one click away from the homepage (e.g. it is linked from the homepage), 2 is two clicks, meaning you have to click from the homepage to an interior page before you can get to this page.

The next step is to sort the Level column by highest to lowest. The further a page is from the homepage the harder it is to get to the page and the less important the page seems. For the most part, on small sites I aim for 2 as the max, and for a very large or ecommerce site I try to keep it within 3.

Our example site is fairly small, so I flagged the one page that was level 3:

The way to increase the page depth is to link from a page 1 less than your max page depth. For example, if you want to have 2 be your deepest page, then you need a link from the homepage (0) or a 1 page depth. A 1 click depth linking to this page will make this page a 2. If 3 is your max depth, go for a 2.

Make a list of all the URLs with a high page depth, then look at the list of pages with 1 page depth. Which ones are related? Add a link (where it makes sense) in the body content of a related page. Problem solved.

Identifying Page with Few Links In

The next piece of data we'll look at is Links In.

Since Xenu is only crawling your site, links in is only measures internal links (links from your site to your site). For this data point we want to sort smallest to largest. This is because pages with few links coming in will have less link juice coming in, and are also viewed as less important because they're not referenced much.

For that reason, our next step is to sort the Links In column smallest to largest.

The site with the most are going to be pages that are linked to sitewide. In this case, the number of links in will be the same as the number of pages on your site (or at least the number of pages that share the same template). I don't have any specific guidelines on what is a good number – overall I'd try to look at what other pages on your site are getting and flag the ones that stand out. Often times on a small site I'll see most pages being linked site wide and then 2 or 3 pages with 1-2 links. Those are the ones we want to rectify.

At the bottom of the screenshot you can see all of the pages have 32 links in – so we know this is a 32 page site. I highlighted the pages with 1-4 links in as ones with opportunities to for more internal links:

Here, the fix is the same as above. Find other pages on the site that are relevant to the page with few links, and add links in the body copy of that page. If the page is particularly important, you might want to add it to your sitewide navigation. If it's not as important, then only link from the on-topic pages.

That's It!

After walking through the process you should now have a list of pages that are buried in your site, as well as a plan for how and where to link to those pages from elsewhere in your site. Or, at the very least, you'll have a reason to pat yourself on the back for having a flat site structure.

Once you've implemented the fixes, I recommend going through this process once more to verify that everything's looking good. Once you get the process down double checking your site should only take 5-10 minutes.

About Guest Author:
Jason Stinnett is a search engine marketer at Internet Exposure, a Minneapolis web design agency specializing in SEO, content marketing and interactive web development.

Article by Guest

This is the guest post, you can know more about the author at the end of the post. If you are interested to guest post then contact us at hello[at]machoarts.com

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投稿者 Max 時刻: 16:20