Our question today comes from Lee, who asked:
“With topic clusters, how important are page paths? We often have our pillar page in the primary navigation, but the support topics will often live in the blog.
They’re interlinked, but the page path doesn’t follow the ideal director of primary-topic/sub-topic/sub-sub-topic.”
This is a great question and touches on a lot of fundamental areas of SEO that we don’t always get right.
Let’s start by addressing topic clusters and what page paths are.
What Are Topic Clusters?
Topic clusters refer to a content system that structures how pages on a website relate to each other.
Essentially, they are a group of pages on a site that are all centered on the same topic.
The pillar page is written to cover the topic broadly, giving an overview of the subject. The “cluster” content goes into more depth on specific aspects of the topic.
For example, your pet store may have a pillar page all about cat toys. It would cover the benefits of toys for cats’ health and what sorts of toys are available.
You would then have more specific pages about each type of toy, toys that aren’t safe for cats, typical cat play behavior, and so on.
This content structure helps website managers create in-depth, relevant copy that covers the breadth of a subject.
The pillar page allows them to target the top-level search queries and questions someone might have about a topic, but the cluster pages will address more specific “long-tail” queries.
As such, the website builds authority in the subject and can show relevance to related search queries.
The key is linking the pages together so that the search bots understand the relationship between the pillar page’s content and the cluster pages.
Reasons Why Page Paths May Be Important For Topic Clusters
Now, onto page paths.
You’ll note that I’ve not mentioned the URL structure in the above explanation.
That’s because, in reality, the pillar and cluster structure relies primarily on links. It is the interlinking between these pages that shows their relationship to each other, not the page path.
Page paths are the bits of the URL that sit after the domain. So, for www.helenspetstore.com/cats/toys/catnip-toys, the “cats/toys/catnip-toys” part is the path.
They Can Make It Easier To Structure Navigation
Page paths can be useful in helping to organize the back end of the website.
If website content is structured in an intuitive and organized way, it can make it obvious what pages should be linking to each other.
For example, breadcrumb links are much easier to create programmatically when they just follow the folder structure shown in the URL.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to create breadcrumbs that don’t follow the same structure as the URL. Instead, there may just need to be some strategic thinking about which pages should be next in the sequence of links.
They Can Help With Organizing Your Site
In a similar way, having an easy-to-understand folder structure for your content means your URLs are a lot easier to group.
Going back to my example of a pet store, imagine I have a category page about dog clothes: www.helenspetstore.com/dogs/clothes.
If all of the dog clothing products my company sells sit within that folder, it might look like this:
Category: www.helenspetstore.com/dogs/clothes
Sub-categories:
www.helenspetstore.com/dogs/clothes/coats
www.helenspetstore.com/dogs/clothes/hats
www.helenspetstore.com/dogs/clothes/shoes
Product page: www.helenspetstore.com/dogs/clothes/shoes/red-winter-shoes-xs
If I decide I no longer want Googlebot to crawl any of those URLs, I can just add a disallow line in the robots.txt that prevents Googlebot from crawling any of the URLs in the /dogs/clothes/ folder, like so:
However, if I structured my product pages to sit outside of my folder structure – like this: www.helenspetstore.com/dogs-red-winter-shoes-xs – then this URL would not be encompassed by the above disallow directive, and Googlebot would still be able to crawl it.
Now, imagine that my website has hundreds of dog clothing product pages. Suddenly, it becomes a much larger task to stop Googlebot from crawling them.
They Can Make It Easier To Analyze
Looking at the above example further, the folder structure also helps with analyzing the performance of these pages when using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
With the product pages sitting within the /dogs/clothes/ folder, I could easily see how all the dog clothes pages, including product pages, were performing by simply looking at the /dogs/clothes/ folder.
However, if the product pages sit outside the /dogs/clothes/ folder, analyzing this would not include the performance of the individual product pages.
They May Impact User Engagement
There are arguments to be made that the URL structure can impact user engagement.