Google’s John Mueller has indicated that search results prioritize pages based on the number of clicks needed to reach them from a site’s home page, rather than the URL structure.
This discussion emerged during a Google Webmaster Central hangout when an ecommerce store owner inquired about the optimal way to structure their site.
The store owner posed this question:
“We have a multi-location brick and mortar store with a single website. Each location has separate inventory, necessitating distinct e-commerce store fronts. We’re debating whether to link these stores directly from the home page or create a link to a ‘/stores’ page and link to them from there.”
Mueller responded by clarifying that the count of slashes in a URL is irrelevant.
What truly matters is the number of clicks required from the home page to a particular page.
If a page is accessible with a single click from the home page, Google considers it more significant, thus granting it more weight in search results.
Conversely, if it takes several clicks to reach a page from the home page, Google regards it as less important.
The essential insight for site owners is: ensure a specific page is easily reachable from the home page if you want it to rank higher than others.
The detailed question and Mueller’s response can be found at the 31:09 mark in the accompanying video.
“In general, both setups would function effectively. There is no substantial advantage to placing URLs in separate sub-directories. We don’t account for slashes in the URLs. If organizing your website on your server into ‘/stores’ and then ‘/location’ is your preference, that’s perfectly fine.
What matters more is how easily the content can be found. Especially if your homepage is the strongest page on your website, it’s challenging for us to recognize the importance of these stores if multiple clicks are required to access them.
Conversely, if it’s a single click from the home page to one of these stores, it signals to us that these stores are probably quite relevant, warranting a little more weight in search results.
Ultimately, it’s more about the number of links clicked to reach the content than the appearance of the URL structure.”
