In reply to a recent question, Gary Illyes of Google expounded on why a hierarchical site structure is good for SEO and under what circumstances you can use a flat site structure.

On the one hand, Gary offers sound reasons for arguing that hierarchical site structures are advantageous and flat-site structures best suit simple websites.

Setting up a Flat Site Structure Every page has a link to the homepage; with one click, you can get to every dense forest.

A site structure with flat hierarchies was adopted as part of the SEO effort to achieve many-to-many mapping.

All pages could receive an equal amount of PageRank and thus have excellent potential for rankings. This was important because, at the time, the highest PageRank went to whoever had a site ranked first.

At the end of this process, Google diminished PageRank’s great influence as a ranker and thus raised the chances that relevant sites with low page ranks would win the position.

There are many ways to use hierarchy, but one simple example is how a thing can be arranged in order from general down through increasingly specific. This is what’s called a hierarchy.

The title tag (title element) represents the theme of the whole website, which is embodied in Science on its home page.

The next lowermost level would be subcategories such as astronomy, botany, geology, meteorology, and psychology.

Astrophysics, the subjects under Astronomy may have separate subcategories like these. Cosmology, Observational Astronomy, Stellar and Planetary Science, etc

However, Gary makes a persuasive argument for using a hierarchical site structure. A hierarchical structuring enables Google to treat various sections of the website differently (for instance, regarding news) without having any effect on other parts of it.

Categories on a webpage can each represent one subject, which helps Google break down the site and recognize what kind of information is included in every section.

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