This isn’t so much a continuation of Yellowbot’s yellow pages seo analysis I wrote about last week as it is a re-examination of the point I brought up regarding Yellowbot’s elimination of category hierarchies.

Last week I posited that by getting rid of category hierarchies such as a list of auto-related category links that appear on a page called “Automotive” or a list of travel related category links that appear on a page called “Travel & Transportation”, Yellowbot had created a much more crawlable, SEO-friendly site architecture. I got a lot of email about this concept and I feel it’s important to make the issue cloudier. What are SEO gurus for afterall?

So here’s the alternative point of view: When you have hundreds of categories like a typical IYP has, it may in fact be a good thing to have these category directory pages because it prioritizes the links to certain categories. In other words, these categories get probably get crawled more often and have more internal links from pages that are high up in the site architecture so they are more likely to do better SEO-wise. The problem is when you have so many categories on so many of these “parent category” directory pages you’re not really prioritizing anything.

At least with Yellowbot’s implementation they are bringing the content of the site closer to the home page and prioritizing the most important categories with direct links from the home page and various city pages. I still think this is better for both SEO and users but the other way is not necessarily horrible.

So the recommendation is “whatever turns you on.”

Trendy Word of the Day: shangbuy.com (although I was tempted to go for “popcorn lung”)

And if you like what you read I would be truly honored if you subscribed to my free RSS SEO feed

Share This Story!

About Author

No Comment

Comments are closed.