Site Architecture for Global Topics - To Organize by Continent or Not

[Webwork]

Should I sweat spiders having to ingest an added directory, in a URL, employed for the purpose of organizing a global (300 country) website . . by continent?

Do I chose:

VERSION 1: DomainTLD/CMSDirRoot/Country/Topic/Subtopic

OR

VERSION 2: DomainTLD/CMSDirRoot/Continent/Country/Topic/

The CMSes I am using can generate navigational elements. If I go with VERSION 1 the CMS wants to create some very long lists of navigational links, i.e., 300+ countries.

IF I set up the CMS to organize the content by continent the CMS generates a somewhat more accessible architecture/link-lists/site-directory structure.

CMS WORK AROUND: Keep everything near root and, ignoring some benefits of the (nicely) auto-generated navigational elements, employ static pages or SSI to embed links to pages that provide pathways to continents+countries.

So, do I labor to keep 300+ countries "1 step closer to root" or not?

In some cases the URL, using continents, will look like this:

DomainTLD/CMSDirRoot/continent/country/city/service

Bad? No, because . . ?

[tedster]

I've found that a continent breakdown is not so useful. Some continents (Africa e.g.) come naturally to mind for an end user, but other areas of the globe (the Near East or India e.g.) don't need it at all. So whenever we've tried to use a continent strategy in a taxonomy, we've ended up augmenting it with a bunch of "not-really-a-continent" names and then needing to cross reference the bits of content to the "real" continent in addition.

For that reason alone I'd lean toward the shorter URL - not because the length of the URL is a Google ranking issue anymore, but also because of the way it will display in the search results.

[edited by: tedster at 6:40 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2010]

[Webwork]

Thanks Ted, very much.

Back to the drawing board . . err . . keyboard.

[HuskyPup]

I've never once considered using continent on either my directory or B&M sites but then again I don't use CMS except for a couple of blogs.

[Robert Charlton]

My emphasis added...

Should I sweat spiders having to ingest an added directory, in a URL, employed for the purpose of organizing a global (300 country) website . . by continent?

Note that organizing the URLs and directories is not the same as organizing the navigation on the site. Be careful of CMS systems that force these to be the same.

So, do I labor to keep 300+ countries "1 step closer to root" or not?

The directories levels from the root should have nothing to do with it. Oversimplifying a bit, what you need to be concerned about is clicks from home.

The question should be how to organize and prioritize the navigation to your main geographical targets from your primary landing pages (which generally include your home page), both for the search engines and for the user.

Also note that for global sites, if you look at typical search stats, you'll see that there generally aren't very many searches that include continents.