What's the best internal link structure?

[jason77]

What is the best strategy to structure your internal links on your website?

Is a directory structure the best way?

[europeforvisitors]

It depends on what you're trying to achieve.

[annej]

I'd like to see more discussion on this. I know it varies as to the kind of site you have. But there are other factors as well.

I'd been linking all pages to the home page. Then each sub-directory is on a different sub topic and I've been linking each page back to the sub topic's contents page. Then I've listed links to all the pages in a given sub topic to each other.

I feel like this is a good user friendly structure as people viewing any subtopic page are more likely to be interested in the other pages in that subtopic.

But I lost a couple of those subtopic content pages as well as pages under them with the 950 filter or whatever it is. So now I'm thinking of going to bread crumbs which I don't think are as user friendly.

BTW this is an informational site on a history topic.

[g1smd]

Heirarchical with breadcrumb trail works for me.

However, pay close attantion to these canonical URL issues:
- www vs. non-www,
- "/" vs. index.html
- capitalisation issues (IIS)
otherwise you end up with many problems.

[Robert Charlton]

I'd been linking all pages to the home page. Then each sub-directory is on a different sub topic and I've been linking each page back to the sub topic's contents page. Then I've listed links to all the pages in a given sub topic to each other.

annej - This kind of hierarchical structure makes a lot of sense, but one point to keep in mind... it doesn't necessarily have to be a directory structure.

Conceivably, you could have a hierarchical link and topic structure but have all of your pages in the root directory. What you're really concerned about is click levels and PageRank distribution from the home page.

[glenng]

- capitalisation issues (IIS)

could someone explain this a little bit more? Thanks

[tedster]

IIS is not case sensitive to the url - but from the beginning the web has been case sensitive. That's always been the spec!

Search engines do not run on Microsoft servers - they use servers that see page.html and Page.html as two different urls, because by definition they ARE two different URLs. This can cause duplicate issues for sites hosted on Microsoft servers. On all other servers, if an anchor used a different capitalization, the link would generate a 404.

[annej]

I didn't mean the directories are part of the navigation. It's just the way I keep some order of all my pages, pictures etc.

I agree what I have now makes sense but the repeating of anchor text to the other pages in each section may be hurting me in the case of some pages. I found eliminating the navigation between pages in one section fixed a 950 problem.

For example 15 pages had the same navigation like this.

widgets 1
red widgets
widgets making
difficult widgets
and so on