Usually the higher up in your site’s architecture a page is, the more likely that page will be able to rank for more competitive keywords. But that’s not always the case. Subfolder paths are also used by search engines to determine relationships between pages. So if a category page ranks for a keyword a product (or in this case a video game) page should rank for, that’s an indication search engines don’t know which to rank for what keyword.
This common problem breaks down into 3 potential causes:
- User Intent
- URL Structure
- Internal Linking
In this case, the user intent was pretty clear. But the other two factors weren’t. So once the new url structure was in place, the internal links were replaced. This allowed search engines to understand what page should be ranked where.