Disadvantages of bad site structure?
In the last SEO Manual article we talked about the advantages of good site structure, in this article we are going to be talking about the disadvantages of a bad site structure. When owning a website having a bad site structure could have a very negative effect both on your sales through your website or maybe even just the amount of hits you get. It may even have a bad effect on the usability of the site.
For a web developer walking into a project which has a bad structure can be a nightmare, whether it is the previous developers coding standards or even if it’s just the way they have their files. Having a bad site structure when developing the website can greatly affect efficiency in editing the site, adding to the site or just general maintenance. The reason it could be bad for the developer is they may not know where things are, they may have to start at the beginning of the script and go through it line by line while they figure out what each bit does, then they have to find the bit that relates to what they are doing before finally finding the piece of code they need to change. Of course the developer who created the code is more than likely to understand every bit and no straight away the bit they need to edit. But like in all businesses the previous developer may not still work there; he may not even be contactable, which will just make it more frustrating. For these reasons I would always try to organise my code well enough so others can read it relatively well. Commenting code could also be a great help when passing complex projects on to others, your comments can simplify the routine for the new developer.
When it comes to the visitors point of view having a bad site structure is a major concern. If they can’t find what they are looking for they will simply turn back to the search results and try the next link down, which will definitely prevent further sales from that person. As they are more than likely to skip past your site next time they search.
From a search engine crawlers point of view having a bad site structure is extremely bad practice, if the search engines crawler can’t navigate through your site, you are very unlikely to even get listed for your keywords, and you will likely spend a lot of money trying to figure out why you aren’t being listed. This could be a number of things from bad navigation layout, JavaScript navigation or a missing XML sitemap. When it comes to JavaScript navigation, I refer to the types of JavaScript navigation that is totally generated by the JavaScript and using minimal HTML to wrap the JavaScript in. The reason you should try and steer clear of JavaScript navigation is a lot of old browsers are incompatible with most of today’s JavaScript menu systems. Also search engines crawlers will not run the JavaScript so the crawler will just see a blank space where the navigation should be. Non of todays search engine crawlers don’t know enough about JavaScript to be able to run it and then use the output. There are always alternates to JavaScripts like for example you could use a CSS list based menu which will create the same effect and will be more search engine friendly. Having a missing XML sitemap could prevent the search engine crawler from finding important pages on your website, further more preventing your website from being ranked for them pages.
I hope this article is found to be useful to anyone who reads it. This article should give you enough reasons to structure your site well, from navigation to the way you organise your code remember site structure is key if you want to be ranked.
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