Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (for example, root page → related topic listing → specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages?
The missing “index”:
For now, on webflow the “real” parent page of page-folders always missing
The solution, for now, is to create a page with URL like /company-pagelist and put under this page links to “team” “our vision” “history” and “why-us” (But this is not the “real” parent of this pages - wrong sitemap tree).
Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.
Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (for example, root page → related topic listing → specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages?
Thanks for the update. This totally sucks and screws my ability to sculpt my page rank with silo structures. I can’t see a good reason they do this. Brings pain on many levels.
Another reason I avoid Webflow for content rich SEO sites.
"Yes, but the “home” page must not be placed in the folder itself, because all the pages in the folder have their own folder prefix. Make sure your page is on the same level of the folder, then name the page slug the same as your folder slug. "
This workaround only works on webflow hosted pages. When you download the HTML to upload it on your own FTP, it doesn’t work anymore.
So you are either stuck with a questionable workaround, or you rename the pages yourself afterwards. (Given that you used external links in the navigation to accompany that)
This is such a little inconvenience, but it has a big impact. Same with missing or tags… i just had a client ask me to put trademarks in the page and i dislike the day for it.
Just dropping a note, I think Jeff will have the same guidance here.
Google cares about url paths, canonicals, sitemap, localization link rels and standard links between pages in order to discern site structure. Plus, maybe JSON-LD breadcrumb metadata. It only cares about what it can see.
As long as the pages delivered follow that structure consistently;
/places /places/uk /places/uk/london
It will utilize that.
From the SEO structure and “juice” perspective, it doesn’t know or care if your pages are files sitting in a directory, or bytes served from a database, or dynamic data manufactured by code.
Unfortunately the workaround that @samliew shared isn’t SEO-friendly, at least not the examples he gave.
Take his first example. He creates a URL called samliew.com /snippets. This is fine, but it ends up 301 redirecting to a page called samliew.com /projects.
So while the “samliew.com /snippets” URL is indeed a valid one, the 301 is telling Google to ignore it, and to pass all of the link juice (via the permanent redirect) to a separate subdirectory called /projects, which I believe is opposite of the intent of this question.
Going back to the OP, has anyone found a workaround that allows you to host a page on /company root (i.e. /company/index.html)?
In Webflow you can create both a static page with the slug /company and a collection page with the slug /company, which means you can do-
/company Directory page, all companies
/company/meta Specific collection item page example, as many as you want.
That’s simple and natively supported.
What you cannot do natively is cascading hierarchies that utilize CMS ref fields to build a semantic structure like;
/store/usa/illinois/chicago/northbrook
When that’s needed I build that for clients using a reverse proxy framework we’ve designed that handles the path rewriting, the redirect of the original collection page, and the canonical and sitemap corrections.
