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There is a website and the layout looks something like below: 

home->approved->
                education             entertainment               business
                    |                      |                        |
            kid, teenager, adult   kid, teenager, adult     kid, teenager, adult
                    |                      |                        |
                  and so on..            and so on..              and so on..

home->not approved->
                education             entertainment               business
                    |                      |                        |
            kid, teenager, adult   kid, teenager, adult     kid, teenager, adult
                    |                      |                        |
                  and so on..            and so on..              and so on..

On homepage, one would see two links - approved and not-approved. Once you click on any of the links, relevant entries will come up and then both pages also have filters on top for further drilling, see above.

Urls are organized like below:

Home/Approved will pull up all entries. 
Home/Approved/Education will pull up education only (and so on). 
Home/Approved/Education/Kid will pull up educational kid only (and so on).

I am planning to organize my sitemap to have two static parent nodes - approved and not approved, and then add all entries dynamically to the sitemap to these two parent nodes and not include sublevels in sitemap at all.

Do you see any problem/pitfall with this approach - in terms of seo or anything else?

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Just to be clear... Are you intending to add all the pages to the sitemap, but just not organised under sub levels/categories. Or are you intending to stop after the sub levels and not display any more pages at lower levels in the sitemap? – w3d Sep 9 '11 at 1:27
@w3d In the sitemap, I was planning to add home->approved and then jump to adding dynamic entries (meaning the leaf, lowest level). I was not going to include lower sublevels (like education, kid, etc.) at all in the sitemap. – TPR Sep 9 '11 at 1:30

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

Unless I'm missing something, I can't see that any differences between the visual arrangement of your sitemap and the structure of your URLs will have any detrimental effect on SEO, or anything else for that matter. I assume the links in your sitemap will still follow the same URL structure.

Having an alternative navigation structure can only be a good thing IMO.

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Maybe I didn't explain well. My sitemap is not including important sublevels (like education, kid) at all - nowhere in the sitemap. Can that impact seo of those keywords in any way? – TPR Sep 9 '11 at 18:34
What do you mean by "Having an alternative navigation structure can only be a good thing IMO."? – TPR Sep 9 '11 at 18:34
But you said that all the leaf pages would be included - presumably these are the actual pages where the content is? If a 'sublevel' is a page in itself with content and not simply a means by which to categorise the leaf page then may be it should be included. – w3d Sep 10 '11 at 10:37
Alternative navigation... Well, you already seem to be able to drill down through the sublevels from the homepage. The sitemap would seem to provide direct (unfiltered) access to all pages without having to traverse sublevels... so in that sense it is an alternative navigation structure. There are 2 ways to get to the leaf page. Presumably the user will only go to the sitemap if they can't find the page through the normal navigation. If the sitemap was structured exactly the same then does it provide any real benefit to the user? – w3d Sep 10 '11 at 10:38
there is no unique content in those sub-levels - except the url itself has important keywords like kid, education etc. According to you, it is okay if sitemap does not mention those keywords at all in any way? – TPR Sep 10 '11 at 19:28
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