The problem is that the website lacks any kind of traditional site architecture. The link juice (ranking power) coming from the hundreds of thousands of domains that link to this company’s homepage has no way of traveling to the other webpages on this domain. All of the link juice is essentially bottled up at the front door.
Its content is located on at least 20 different domains, and there is no global navigation that leads users or search engines from the homepage down to categorized pages. The company’s online presence is more like a thousand islands rather than the super continent it could be. It is an enormous waste of resources and is directly affecting the company’s bottom line in a real way.
When explaining site architecture to clients, I start out by asking them to visualize a website like an ant hill. All of the chambers are like webpages and the tunnels are like internal links. I then have them imagine a little boy pouring water into the ant hill. He pours it down the main entrance and wants to have it fill all of the chambers. (As a side note, scientists actually have done this with cement to study the structure of ant metropolises. In one case, they had to pour 10 tons of liquid cement into an ant hill before it filled all of the chambers.) In this analogy the water represents the flow of link juice to webpages. As discussed earlier, this link juice (popularity) is essential for rankings.
The optimal structure for a website (or ant hill, if you must) would look similar to a pyramid
NOTE Homepages are almost always the most linked-to pages on a domain.
This is because they are the most convenient (the shortest) URL to link to when
referring to the website online.
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