1,000,000 Pages Correctly Indexed by Search Engines

I’ve talked before about the link architecture of a website and now here is another article that will show you a practical approach. Proper link architecture will help your indexing process: this means that search engines will know about your content and readers will be able to find you through search.

Indexing a big website could be a challenge if the link architecture hasn’t been properly planned from the beginning. Now you may ask what “big website” is? 1,000,000 pages big.

Here is the simple way you can organize your pages so that you ensure the indexing:

Level 1: The Home Page (the main page)

Level 2: The Category Pages

Level 3: The Subcategory Pages

Level 4: The Products

Now, you can safely place 100 links on Level 1. This means links to 100 main categories on Level 2 that will also have 100 links each to subcategories on Level 3. We already have 10,000 pages that can be reach by only 2 clicks. If we add the third click, to Level 4, we’ll reach 1,000,000 pages. You can always go a step further and have 100,000,000 pages that can be reach by 4 clicks.

This flat link architecture works best and this is the approach not only for big websites but for smaller ones too.

The Paradox: nothing is 100% sure. This link architecture will ensure the fact that the search engines will crawl your entire website and in almost all the cases will guarantee 100% the indexing. It’s well known that search engines don’t crawl your website in a linear way.

I mean, maybe the first time the search engine bot will visit your main page and then go on links. But once your website establishes itself on the web search engines tend to optimize the crawling and the indexing. The reason is obvious: every day millions of pages are created and search engines have to keep up.

So, in time, you’ll see that the entrance path of the Google bot might not be your main page. You should keep an eye on the entrance points of search engines because what this means is that those points carry more weight for search engines.

And if you have a really big website you can basically use those points to pass link juice and to determine the search engine’s bot to continue crawling.

Now, tell me if your link architecture was planned before you build your website. Share your problems or ideas and let’s all learn from all this.