SEO myth: Topical content hubs don’t have to be nested in a subfolder.
I touched on some high-level approaches in the first two series, so it’s time to take on a more tactical one this time.
I’ve heard these get called several different names: content groups, topic clusters, hub and spoke, content directories. I’ll call them topical content hubs because I think it’s the most explanatory phrase, but whichever naming convention you follow, there’s one common misconception that doesn’t want to die off about them: the architecture.
Raising my hand here as a guilty participant in this myth’s perpetuation 🙋🏻♂️.
Most people (including me for way too long) believe that these topical hubs must be structured with the hub page as the group’s sub-folder and the spoke pages nested inside of the sub-folder. That would look like this.
Hub Page “A”
Spoke pages “B” & “C”
www.yoursite.com/hub-a/spoke-b
www.yoursite.com/hub-a/spoke-c
Now, there’s nothing wrong with this setup. I still love it for organizational cleanliness, but the sub-folder organization method isn’t really measurably impactful on strengthening the group’s SEO performance.
What does have an impact, is the internal linking patterns and relationships within your topical content hubs. I’ll cover that in a separate TL;DR, but the idea for this week is: internal links, not sub-folders, for generating SEO lifts across topical content hubs.
So if you prefer to categorize pages with sub-folders, that’s great! I’m still a fan. Just know that you have plenty of room to change your mind if an alternate structure is in consideration.