Siloing a Site: Root Level Pages?

[animalstyle]

I am in a situation right now making siloing decisions for re-designing a site.

Currently the site has quite a few silos, and some unnecessary stuff due to the engineering. I am doing some cleaning and housekeeping as the content migration is happening. Pretty much everything on the site lives within a silo like follows:

site.com/about/history/
site.com/about/staff/
site.com/about/mission/

site.com/support/contact/
site.com/support/privacy/
site.com/support/disclaimer/

etc

The site is an ecommerce site, the products currently all live under /products/:

site.com/products/widget1.html
site.com/products/widget2.html
site.com/products/widget3.html

When it comes to transferring to the new, it might be complicated from an engineering standpoint to keep all the products under the same site.com/products/ silo, but it's possible. My gut tells me to get the work done and keep them there. The other option is to put them under the root like this:

site.com/widget1.html
site.com/widget2.html
site.com/widget3.html

To me this seems wrong, but if you asked me to argue for it, I couldn't convince you with logic.

The only thing I can think is that its OK to be under the root as the site is all about selling it's widgets. IE when you think Apple, you think iphone, ipad, macbook etc. When you think about this site, you think widget1, widget2, widget3.

Any insight?

 

[dresden]

So you're describing whats called a 'flat architecture' with the new format. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, though I do prefer full taxonomy / hierarchy for information architecture.

I'd do whatever you want... but do note that any 301 redirects will zap some of the juice and those pages probably won't rank as high as they did prior to the redirects.