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On my site 5 second level pages are the run away leading entry pages. Meaning the get about roughly 65% of all entries.
These are big pages with perhaps 250 links (each) out to my other pages (all different). They are more or less big indexes of related pages.
Right now each of these pages focuses on the products of a "Parent Company", and has a section for each of that "Parent Companies" "Brands".
Under each "Brand" section are the links to my other pages.
This leaves me with these important pages each trying to focus on 5 - 6 "Brand" Names as keywords.
My question is this.
IF I divide the pages into "Brand" Pages
("Brand" Name being the main keyowrd for each page)
Will that be likely to help, or hurt me as far as search engines go?
And if I divide them, should I move them up to the root level?
I think the thing you need to watch out for is burying those topic specific pages too deep in the structure of the site. If you can keep everything at 3rd level and above, you should do well.
root/level-1/level-2/level-3
I would attempt to keep your main theme pages at the root level. Then your secondary theme pages at level 1, and then any other pages at levels 2 and 3. Again, the most important at the root level, these would probably be your main category pages.
Think of it as a Chain of Command. You have your Admirals at the top, Vice Admirals in the second positon and your Captains come after that.
If you have enough content to start developing additional web properties, that is another option. But only if the content is unique and the size of the site justifies branching off into very topic specific sites.
You can also use Canonicals to help in the theme of things. There are a few options available. Its all going to come down to organization and the internal linking structure of the site.
If your current structure is producing 65% of your SE traffic from the pages you've mentioned, you might want to re-think the idea of changing it.
At most the new pages would be one level down from the root. So That sounds like I'm on track. For the most part my content pages only go 3 levels deep.
Root (homepage) >
Main section index pages >
Target content Pages.
By redoing the links from my home page I can still keep the target content just 2 - 3 clicks from the home page.
(If folks wander around the site they can drag that out to about 4 - 5 clicks at the very most. That's really my fault for a planning error when I set up the site plan in the beginning.)
But would moving these new pages up to the root be of any value as far as search engines go?
(This is a big job, I'm going to have to modify links on 1,000 pages and I don't want to have to do that again anytime soon :) )
Hmmm.... OK.
Here's part of my thinking.
It seems to me that on these existing pages the keywords must be fight for recognition by the search engine.
Each existing page contains at least 5 main keywords now. By breaking the pages down further I could get that to one main keyword.
Of course that would really be modified to become a 2 - 3 word phrase in most cases.
Currently the existing pages are aboy 45 - 50 k, the new pages would be about 18 - 20 k, if that makes a difference.
And I could keep the old pages and just add the new pages, but I might run into problems with duplicate content then.
