Joost de Valk, the creator of Yoast SEO plugin, has created a new (and free) plugin for solving a site architecture problem that can silently diminish a website’s ability to rank.
Site Architecture
Site architecture is an important SEO factor because a well-organized website with clear navigation helps users quickly get to the content and products they’re looking for. Along the way it also helps Google find the most important pages and rank them.
The normal and common sense way to organize a website is by topic categories. While some newbie-SEOs believe that organizing a site by topic is an SEO strategy, it’s really just plain old common sense. Organizing a site by topic categories organizes a site in a way that makes it easy to drill-down and find specific things.
Tags: Contextual Site Navigation
Another way to organize a website is through contextual navigation. Contextual navigation is a way to offer a site visitor links to more webpages that are relevant to the webpage and to their interests in the moment. The way to provide a contextual link is through the concept of Tags. Tags are strongly relevant links to content that site visitors may find interesting.
For example, if someone is on a webpage about a new song by a pop star they may in that moment may be interested in reading more articles about that singer. A publisher can create a tag which links to a page that collects every article about that specific pop singer. Ordinarily it doesn’t make sense to create an entire category for hundreds of musical artists because that would defeat the purpose of a hierarchical site navigation (which is to make it easy to find content).
Tags solve the problem of making it easy to navigate to more content that one site visitor is specifically interested in at that moment. It’s contextually relevant navigation.
Too Many Good Things Isn’t Always Good
Creating a long-range plan for organizing a website can be undone by time as a website grows and trends wane. An artist that was trending several years ago may have dropped out of favor (as they often do) and people lose interest. But those tags remain, linking to content that isn’t important anymore, defeating the purpose of internal site navigation, which is to link to the most important content.
Joost de Valk researched a (very small) sample of WordPress sites and discovered that about two thirds of the websites contained overlapping tags, multiple tags linking to the same content while also generating thin content pages, which are webpages with little value.
A blog post sharing his findings noted: