Site Architecture Reorganization Workflow

A LinkMap draws children in an arc around their parent, so the shape on screen is your hierarchy: how many hops each page sits from the homepage. Hovering gives you the second reading, which is what actually links to what.

Reorganization lives in the gap between those two readings. Pages drawn side by side because their content is related, with nothing linking them, are the work.

Spot Related Pages That Never Link

Hover any node and, after a short beat, every node it does not link to drops back to a fifth of its brightness. Those are ghost nodes. The node under your cursor and the pages it does link to stay lit, with arrows drawn in for direction, and moving the cursor away brings the map back.

Hover a parent and its children stay lit, because the parent links to them. Hover one of those children and the other children go ghost, because siblings sit next to each other without linking to each other.

Those ghosted siblings are the finding. The layout put them together because they cover related ground; the ghosting says nothing joins them. That is either a missing link or a page filed in the wrong place.

Three ways to close it: move the page to a URL that matches where it belongs, add internal links from the section it is actually related to, or rewrite it so it stops competing with its neighbor for the same query.

Read Depth From The Edge

The map is drawn outward from the homepage, so distance from the center is hops from home and the pages on the outer edge are the deepest. Click one to open its details and read the depth.

No depth is too deep on its own. Compare it against the rest of your own site, and against the pages already ranking for the query you want, which is a different answer for every query.

If you do decide a page sits too far out, add a link from a page nearer the middle rather than from the homepage. A homepage link moves the number without changing the route a reader takes.

Where This Fits

Do this while the crawl is fresh. Every link you move or add changes the PageRank that the next reading depends on, so a reorganization done against stale data measures the wrong site.

It is one step of the wider SEO workflow, and the result of it shows up in performance correlation once there is enough data on the far side of the change.