Wasting Link Authority on Ineffective Internal Link Structure

Wasting Link Authority on Ineffective Internal Link Structure

If you put one form of internal navigation in parallel with another you are essentially telling search engines that both paths and both subset pages are of the same significance. Many websites likely lose 20% or more of their potential traffic due to sloppy information architecture that does not consider search engines.
Many people believe that having more pages is always better, but ever since Google got more aggressive with duplicate content filters and started using minimum PageRank thresholds to set index inclusion priorities that couldn't be further from the truth. Shoemoney increased his Google search traffic 1400% this past month by PREVENTING some of his pages from being indexed.
Some types of filtering are good for humans while being wasteful for search engines. For example, some people may like to sort through products by price levels or look at different sizes and colors, but pages that are almost duplicate with the exception of price point, size, model number, or item color may create near duplicate content that search engines do not want to index.
If you are wasting link equity getting low value noisy pages indexed then your high value pages will not rank as well as they could because you wasted link equity getting low value pages indexed. In some cases getting many noisy navigational pages indexed could put your site on a reduced crawling status (shallow crawl or less frequent crawl) that may preclude some of your higher value long tail brand specific pages from getting indexed.
More commonly searches that have some sort of filter associated with them will be associated specific brands rather than how we sort through those brands via price-points. Plus the ads for those terms tend to be more expensive as well.
The reasons brands exist is that they are points of differentiation that allow us to charge non commodity prices for commodities. That associated profit margin and marketing driven demand is why there is typically so much more money in branded terms than other non-brand related filters.
When designing your site's internal link structure make sure that you are not placing noisy low value pages and paths in parallel or above higher value paths and pages.