Chapter 15 — Exercises

Work these in order; they graduate from recall to judgment. Items marked † have full worked solutions in the answers appendix (and in this chapter's _scratch/answers/ch15.md). No answers appear in this file — try each honestly before checking. Where a task says "your own site," use any site you can access (your own, an employer's, a client's, or a public site you know well) and a free tool.

A. Recall and concepts

  1. Define crawl depth in one sentence, and state what depth the homepage has.

  2. † Explain the difference between a flat and a deep architecture, and give one advantage and one risk of each.

  3. In your own words, what is link equity, and what is the relationship between link equity and PageRank?

  4. What three qualities define a good URL structure? Give a one-line example of a URL that violates each.

  5. † Define an orphan page. Which stage of the Chapter 1 pipeline does an orphan most often fail at, and why?

  6. What is the difference between a hub-and-spoke structure and a silo? Can a site use both at once?

  7. Name the four jobs a breadcrumb does at once (for the user, the crawler, link flow, and the SERP).

  8. † Why does a link from a page that links to five other pages pass more link equity than a link from a page that links to two hundred? Explain using the simplified model from §15.4.

  9. What is a crawl trap? Name three structures that commonly create one.

  10. True or false, and explain: "The number of slashes in a page's URL is what Google means by how 'deep' the page is."

B. Applied reasoning

  1. A site's most important commercial page sits six clicks from the homepage. List two distinct SEO consequences of that depth, each tied to a specific mechanism from the chapter.

  2. † Your homepage has an authority value we'll illustrate as 100. It currently links to 25 pages. A colleague wants to add 75 more links to the main navigation "so every page gets homepage authority." Using the simplified model from §15.4, explain what actually happens to the equity each linked page receives, and whether this helps.

  3. A blog has 300 posts but only 12 of them have any internal links pointing to them; the other 288 are reachable only from a paginated "all posts" archive 8 pages deep. Describe the architecture problem in the chapter's vocabulary, and propose a hub-and-spoke fix.

  4. Explain why breadcrumbs are described in the chapter as "close to a free win." Name the one thing they require to also appear as a rich result in the SERP, and which chapter covers it.

  5. † A developer proposes changing 40 existing, indexed, traffic-earning URLs from /p?id=1234 to keyword-rich paths like /best-water-heater-repair-service/. Give the honest cost-benefit analysis from §15.2. Would you approve it? Under what condition might you?

  6. Why does the chapter insist that internal linking "redistributes authority but does not manufacture it"? Why does that boundary matter for how you should think about a brand-new site with no external links yet?

C. Diagnose why this page isn't ranking

  1. † A page is a genuinely excellent, comprehensive, intent-matched guide. It has been live for two months and ranks for nothing; Search Console shows it was discovered only three weeks ago and has few impressions. Before touching the content, name the two most likely architecture causes and the check you would run for each.

  2. Two pages target the same topic and are equally good. Page A gets steady organic traffic; Page B gets none. Page A is linked from the main nav and six related articles; Page B is linked from nowhere except the sitemap. Write the one-sentence diagnosis and the one-sentence fix.

  3. An e-commerce category page ranks poorly, and Search Console shows the site has 40,000 indexed URLs when the store has only 1,200 products. Diagnose what is likely happening, name the pipeline cost, and point to the chapter(s) that fix it.

D. Audit your own site (free tools)

  1. † Open Google Search Console → Links → Internal links. Record: (a) your five most-linked pages, (b) whether your five most important pages appear near the top, and (c) any important page with fewer than three internal links. Write one sentence on what you found and the single link you will add this week.

  2. Measure the crawl depth of your three most important pages by clicking from the homepage (using only on-page links, not the address bar). Record the click count for each. Are any deeper than three? Note why.

  3. Run a site:yourdomain search and skim the indexed pages. Do you see junk URLs (filters, duplicates, internal-search pages, tag archives) you did not intend to be indexed? List up to five, and note whether they suggest a crawl trap.

E. Restructure and design

  1. † Redesign this bloated main navigation into a curated one. Current top-level menu (14 items): Home, AC Repair, AC Install, Furnace Repair, Furnace Install, Water Heater, Drain Cleaning, Panel Upgrade, EV Charger, Cedar Hills, Northgate, Westbrook, Millhaven, Blog. Propose a main nav of no more than six top-level items and describe how the rest are reached.

  2. Design a clean, hierarchical URL for each of these Rivertown pages: (a) the plumbing category hub; (b) the drain-cleaning service; (c) the drain-cleaning service in Northgate; (d) a guide on how to relight a pilot light. Follow the §15.2 conventions.

  3. † Sketch (in text or a simple tree) a hub-and-spoke structure for a "furnace problems" cluster: one hub and at least four spokes. Show the links in both directions and one honest cross-silo link you would allow.

  4. You are given a new, well-written page that deserves to rank but has no links. Name the three-step strategic-internal-linking method from §15.5, then apply it: describe how you would pick the source pages and what anchor text you would use.

F. Read the report

  1. † Interpret this internal-links report excerpt (a constructed teaching example):

    text INTERNAL LINKS (constructed) links in / 412 /about/ 388 /contact/ 388 /blog/how-to-flush-water-heater/ 47 /services/plumbing/water-heater-replacement/ 2 The water-heater-replacement page is a priority commercial page. What does this report reveal, and what are your top two moves?

  2. A crawl report shows 9,500 of a 10,000-URL site are "Discovered – currently not indexed," and nearly all of them are ?sort= and ?filter= parameter URLs. In the chapter's terms, what is this, and what is the fix (and which chapter owns the tools)?

G. Spot the myth

  1. † A consultant's audit says: "Add rel=nofollow to your footer, login, and cart links to sculpt PageRank toward your product pages." Identify the myth, state when it stopped working and what actually happens now, and give the legitimate alternative.

  2. A blog post claims: "For SEO, every page must be within three clicks of the homepage — it's a Google rule." Correct it precisely: what is folklore here, and what true, directional idea is underneath it?

  3. An "SEO expert" insists: "Never let a page in your Plumbing silo link to a page in your HVAC silo — it leaks link equity and confuses Google." Evaluate this claim and give the rule that should replace it.

H. Ethics, risk, and judgment

  1. A colleague wants to build 50 near-identical service-by-city pages this week, one per service per city, from a template, and cross-link them heavily. Explain the architecture shape that is legitimate here and the specific risk (and its name) that this plan courts — and which chapter you would tell them to read before shipping.

  2. † When is making a site flatter the wrong move? Describe a case where excessive flatness harms both users and link flow, and state the principle that resolves "flat vs. deep" better than either extreme.

I. Rivertown Strategy-File extensions

  1. † Extend Rivertown's architecture (Figure 15.2): the company just added a new service, "sump pump installation." Where does it live in the hierarchy, what is its URL, what links to it on day one so it is not an orphan, and what is its crawl depth?

  2. Rivertown's water-heater page (the #11 page) has now had its title, comprehensiveness, and internal links fixed across Chapters 9 and 15. Write the honest two-sentence status update you would give the Delgados — one sentence on what is now done, one on what remains and why you will not promise a ranking.

  3. Propose the exact three internal links you would add this week to feed Rivertown's HVAC hub the way we fed the water-heater page — naming the source page, the reason a reader would want the link, and the anchor text for each.