Impact of URL structure on SEO

Question

I'm working on a major update on one of my website after a slow but continued lowering in google search rankings. I went from 1/2 on my major pages to being at 3 or 4th position.

Currently my website is not realy structured, I added pages over years and it's basically all pages on the root directory, and a "/en/" directory for english version of each page.

I did add pages that are not exactly on my niche but close enough for me, and those are not ranking well. I was thinking that it may be a good thing to structure a bit my website such as : website.com/Category1/page1 website.com/Category1/page2

Etc...

Also, I don't know if the way of putting the english version in a /en/ directory is a good way. The english pages are making almost all my traffic though.

Since I'm working on a major update, I thought that maybe it would be a good time to modify things up. But I don't know if that's worth the time or not. I checked different posts about that, and people seems to say it doesn't matter much.

Answer 1

The physical structure of the website had no bearing on SEO. Do what makes it easier to manage. You can use rewrites in htaccess for instance, to logically restructure your site. Even then it only has a small effect on SEO. You can do this to make it easier for your users to navigate it.

You can restructure a category at a time, using rewrites. While you have two urls pointing to the same page, make sure to use the canonical tag. When you are ready, use redirects from the old url to the new ones. Again, you can do this a category at a time.