Question about site structure

[Shopclicks]

I have a question about the way in which the retail websites I manage are structured, from a Google friendly perspective.

The building platform I use only introduced 'product filters' in January last year. The websites were constructed years before that. When I built the sites, the only way I could structure the category pages was to have one page per category as sub-menus, which are sub-menus of a main menu webpage.

The main menu webpage is just a user friendly page which contains links to all of it's sub-menu category pages.

I have used the product filters on each category page which makes for a better user experience.

I can also now create pages of filtered products and give them a unique (clean) url. For example:
mysitedotcom.au/camping-equipment-tents. However, I can only filter tagged products from within that category.

So in theory, could I create one big category (let's say 500 products) and create 10 sub-category pages using filtered products, as my sub-menu pages? Is there any benefit in doing that rather than what I have now? Does Google have a problem with filtered pages?

The way the sites are set up now, we get really good organic ranking, so I wouldn't want to ruin that. But, I'm always on the lookout for better ways to do things.

Or is there a better alternative?
Thanks!

 

[Shopclicks]

Thanks for that article. What I get out of that, is that it's more important that the content of the page I link from, needs to be relevant to the page I link to and vice versa. The article talks about sub-menu links to secondary categories but doesn't really touch on links via webpage content.

I'd really like to know if there is a difference between the two structures.

 

[Shopclicks]

Ok. Thanks for that. I've done some research and it looks like I'm using a combination of both 'silo' and 'virtual'. The jury seems to be out on which gives better rankings more consistently.

I'd be interested to see which is the more widely used by the seo experts here. And why.

 

[LowPrices.uk]

It's good to be aware of all SEO and marketing techniques, but keep in mind that some techniques have far more impact than others. i.e. focus on where you will get big wins instead of small ones.

 

[jmwang]

The site structure is very important for crawling,index,user experience and ranking