Google: Don't Follow Big Sites SEO, They Often Get It Wrong

John Mueller from Google replied to a question in the Stack Exchange forums about following up YouTube set up their structure and how it might impact them if they followed, from an SEO crawlability perspective.

John responded that it is often not a good idea to just blindly follow how big sites do things because they often get it wrong, he said.

The question was:

I've noticed that some sites are moving away from root-directory user profiles. For example, YouTube channel URLs are now /channel/ and /c/ instead of simply /.

For a site with user profiles (or in YouTube's case, channels), which is preferred?

John replied:

I would not blindly follow some big site's structure, in the hope that they must have planned everything in detail. All sites are different, and you'd be surprised at how often big sites manage to get things wrong :).

YouTube, a Google owned property, do something wrong? No way!.

In any event, John went in and explained what he should think about in detail in the thread.

Forum discussion at Stack Exchange.