The two most common website navigation structures are flat sites and deep sites. Flat websites are websites that try to make each web page available with very few clicks. Deep websites are websites that use long paths to access specific pages on the site.

A deep website structure enables you to create very exact and targeted topical pages on your website. The disadvantage of a deep website structure is that website visitors and search engine crawlers take longer to find the content they are looking for.

A flat website structure makes it easier for website visitors and search engines to find all pages of your website. The fewer pages your visitors have to go through before finding the content they are looking for, the better.

Help your website visitors and search engine bots to get maximum results. All pages on your website should be accessible with a maximum of four clicks from the home page of your site.

In addition, the navigational elements on your website reflect the importance of the linked pages. It usually makes sense to create your website structure like this:

• Create an overview of all pages of your website.
• Break the content into core categories and create a top level navigation that hold the different content types of your site.
• Create logical sub categories.
• If necessary, create another sub category level.
• Link the targeted pages from the sub category pages.

If you need a public sitemap of your website so that your visitors can find all pages then your regular website navigation is not good enough.

Although a sitemap can help search engines and website visitors to find pages on your site, the regular navigation of your website should be so good that a sitemap is not needed.

"We don't use Google Analytics in Search, and Google Analytics & Search Console track data quite differently. SC tracks what's shown in Search, GA tracks what happens when a user goes to a site. There's overlap, but it's not exact."

Editor's note: You can optimize your web pages with the SEO tools in SEOprofiler. SEOprofiler can also check your Google Analytics stats.

"Google's John Mueller was asked in a recent Google webmaster hangout video if negative search results about a brand can hurt that brand's web site from ranking in Google search. John said no - it shouldn't. John also talked a bit about if there is a need or not to do reputation management in general."

"Google will look to see if its algorithms are doing well and doing what they are suppose to be doing by looking at user signals, like clicks. But no where does this say that Google is feeding this directly back into ranking algorithms."