Large-scale websites face unique challenges when it comes to technical SEO. Whether you’re managing an e-commerce giant or a global travel site, staying on top of the technical aspects is crucial for maintaining search visibility, crawlability and user experience. In this post, we’ll cover the essential technical SEO best practices specifically geared towards complex, large-scale websites.
How do you approach technical SEO for large-scale websites?
Site architecture and navigation
A well-organised site architecture is the foundation of SEO success for large websites. With potentially thousands of pages to manage, ensuring that search engines can easily crawl and understand your site is vital.
Organising site structure
A clean, logical hierarchy that places important content within three clicks of the homepage can improve both user experience and search engine crawling. Use descriptive categories and subcategories to group content. If you are currently working with large-scale websites, then you may have seen a similar graph to the one below.
A common issue for large-scale websites is that they don’t have the tech or site structure in place to support their growth in an SEO-friendly way. As websites grow, it’s vital that the site structure is set up in a way that facilitates this growth and keeps important pages easily accessible to users and search engines.
The example below shows the majority of pages aren’t accessible within Google’s guidelines of three-clicks. Investing in the tech set-up, navigation and search functions can help growing websites maintain a solid SEO foundation, support the indexability of important pages and provide a positive user experience.
Breadcrumbs and internal linking
Implementing breadcrumbs and a robust internal linking strategy helps users and search engines navigate your site more effectively. This reduces the risk of orphaned pages (pages without any links pointing to them) and spreads link equity throughout your site. Google uses internal links on a website to crawl a website and identify pages to index, so having a proper internal linking structure in place also helps the indexability of a site and helps your content rank in Google.
Breadcrumbs are a great way of supporting your internal linking structure, as they give users and search engines an easy way to navigate a website logically and to find relevant pages in their journey.
XML sitemaps
An often overlooked part of the tech set-up of a website is utilising your XML sitemap. As discussed previously, larger websites can experience issues of having pages hidden deep down inside the site architecture, making them harder for users to find and signalling to Google that they aren’t important. This is why XML sitemaps play a crucial role for large websites in ensuring that search engines can discover all your content. An XML sitemap is a file that contains all of the important pages on a website. As well as crawling a website via the internal linking structure, Google uses the XML sitemap to find and identify pages on a website and depending on the structure of the file, they can also get a better understanding of the structure of your website.
For larger websites, a recommendation for your XML sitemap is to break it into separate sitemaps for different categories of pages (e.g., products, categories, blog posts) and keep them under 50,000 URLs per file to avoid crawling issues. A Sitemap Index File can then be used to host links to all of the individual sitemaps that have been created. Once you’ve created your XML sitemap(s) and hosted them in a sitemap index file (If needed), it’s best practice to test them before submitting them to Google. This can be done via Google Search Console.
Crawl budget optimisation
Search engines allocate a crawl budget to each site, determining how often and how deeply they crawl it. For large sites, crawl budget management becomes critical to ensure your most important pages are indexed. We’ve listed some tips below on how you can optimise the crawl budget for larger websites:
Prioritising high-value pages
Ensure that important pages, such as key product or service pages, are easily discoverable by search engines. As mentioned before, a way to do this is to establish a strong internal linking structure and ensure these pages are included in your sitemap. If you’re using a mega menu, then linking your priority pages from here is vital.
Blocking low-value pages
Smaller websites may not have to worry as much about the crawl budget, but as they grow, more and more pages of low value may be using up valuable crawl budgets and stopping Google from finding pages of value. A crucial part of optimising a site in general, is to review which pages bring in relevant traffic to the site and which aren’t. For the pages that aren’t driving relevant traffic, or any traffic at all, your process should involve flagging any pages that may benefit from a revamp in content, any pages that can be consolidated and redirected towards more up-to-date versions and any pages that may be beneficial to the user but are not pages that you want to leverage for organic traffic. For this final category, it’s best practice to use the robots.txt file or noindex tags to block these low-value pages from being indexed by Google. Examples of these pages could be login screens, filtered URLs or duplicate content generated by URL parameters. This frees up your crawl budget for more important areas of your site.
Server performance
Slow-loading pages can negatively impact your crawl budget. If search engine bots encounter slow servers, they may reduce how frequently they crawl your site. Ensure your servers are optimised and can handle the traffic volume. Tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix will highlight if your website is experiencing issues with your server – see an example in the image below.
For this example, you can implement server-side caching, which will save a pre-generated version of each page and show this to users when requested. This prevents your server from having to load the page every time someone clicks through to that page.
Duplicate content and canonicalisation
With so many pages on a large website, it’s easy to run into indexing problems or duplicate content issues. Proper canonicalisation ensures that the correct version of a page is indexed, avoiding penalties for duplicate content.
Managing duplicate content
Duplicate content is one of the most common issues with larger websites, simply from the fact that there are a lot more pages that need unique content on the site.
A common reason why technical SEO tools may flag a page as having duplicate content is due to pages having thin or not a lot of copy on them. If a page is thin on content or if the site uses duplicated content sections across similar pages, this can be confusing to Google, as it simply doesn’t have enough information to understand what the focus of the page is and which pages to show in the SERPs for specific search queries.
The obvious way around this is to create unique copy for every page on a website, that clearly indicates to Google and the user what the page is about. However, with larger websites, that could have millions of pages, this isn’t an easy fix. The tech set-up of some larger websites might mean that new pages are automatically generated when certain criteria are met, which can lead to a large volume of pages being created with little to no copy on them or even duplicated copy.
One way of managing duplicate content is to implement canonical tags on pages that are similar or have duplicate content (e.g., different product variations). This tells search engines which version of the page should be indexed. Tools like Oncrawl and SEMrush will flag any duplicate content issues that you may be experiencing on a website – see the example below.
Using a travel website as an example of where canonical tags could be used to manage duplicate content, is where the site may have pages for individual room types available within the same hotel (e.g. 1 bed, 2 bed, 3 bed) and a page for the hotel. In this example, you could implement canonical tags for this set of pages, to tell Google that you’d like the main hotel landing page to be the page that ranks in the SERPs, whilst the rest of the pages are useful to the user, they aren’t pages that you want to rank in the SERPs.
URL structure and parameters
URLs should be clean, descriptive and easy to understand for both users and search engines. For large sites, improper handling of URL parameters can lead to a host of SEO issues.
Creating SEO-friendly URLs
When creating a new URL or a new set of URLs, it’s best practice to keep them short and descriptive. Avoid using unnecessary parameters and ensure that URLs are structured consistently across your site. If you have a group of pages that fit within a specific topical hub, then ensure that these are hosted in the same subfolder. Going back to our travel website example, they might have a /spain/ subfolder where their Spanish cities sit within – e.g. /spain/madrid/ or /spain/barcelona/.
Managing URL parameters
For e-commerce or other large-scale sites with filtering options, improper handling of URL parameters can lead to the creation of multiple versions of the same page, causing duplicate content issues. As previously mentioned, these can be managed by using canonical tags or setting the parameters to be ignored by search engines using the robots.txt file.
Handling 404 errors and redirects
Large websites often face the challenge of managing 404 errors, which can arise due to outdated links, deleted content or incorrect URLs. The indexing report in Google Search Console (GSC) will be your best and worst friend in managing the 404s, redirects and other indexing issues on site. It’s a great place to find issues to fix, but it can be very overwhelming when dealing with large websites, which will often have a plethora of indexing issues, if not managed correctly from an SEO perspective. Below are a few steps that can help break this down into easy, more manageable steps to clearing up your indexing report in GSC:
Monitoring and fixing 404s
Regularly check for 404 errors using tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog or Oncrawl. Fix these issues by updating internal links that are pointing towards 404 pages, implementing proper redirects to retired pages and removing URLs that are returning 404 status codes from your sitemaps.
301 vs 302 redirects
When redirecting pages, always use 301 redirects for permanent changes. 302 redirects (temporary) should only be used when the change is not permanent. When implementing a 301 redirect, use your technical SEO tools to identify any internal links that are pointing towards the old URL and update them to link directly to the new URL instead. This will help to maintain link equity and avoid unnecessary redirect chains.
Schema markup and structured data
Where this isn’t exclusive to large websites, it’s worth a mention of how important structured data is to SERP visibility. Structured data can help search engines better understand your site’s content and improve visibility through rich snippets. In a world where zero-click searches are becoming more common, with the emergence of AI Overviews as well as Answer Snippets, any opportunity you get to give Google more information about your site, page or product is worth utilising. Implementing schema markup can help your content stand out in search results and increase click-through rates to important pages.
Implementing structured data at scale
For large websites, implementing structured data site-wide can be a challenge, given the number of pages on the site. A way around this is to use tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or plugins for popular CMS platforms like Schema Pro to streamline the process. At Passion Digital, we also have a handy Schema Builder that uses AI technology to help you create schema markup of your choosing.
Popular schema types include product, article, review and FAQ markup, all of which can enhance search result listings. Find out more about different types of schema markup for B2B businesses in our helpful guide.
Managing the technical SEO of a large, complex website requires attention to detail, proactive monitoring and the use of the right tools and expertise. This guide highlights some of the best practices to follow, but there’s a lot more to take into consideration such as log file analysis and specific international SEO best practices for large-scale websites.
By following the best practices listed above, you’ll be better equipped to keep your website running smoothly, ensure search engines can properly crawl and index your content and ultimately improve your search visibility.
Of course, if you are looking for assistance with the SEO for your large-scale website, please get in touch with the SEO team at Passion and we’ll be happy to help!