Track a topic cluster by folder: Atlassian's Agile Coach
Atlassian files 12 Scrum pages outside its /agile/scrum/ folder. What its Agile Coach teaches about tracking a topic cluster with nested folders.
To track a topic cluster by folder, the folder has to hold every page on the topic. Atlassian's Agile Coach shows both halves of that rule on one site: 222 English pages under /agile/, a sub-folder for each sub-topic, and twelve Scrum pages filed in the wrong one. A Search Console filter on /agile/scrum/ reports 17 Scrum pages and never sees the other 12.
We read Atlassian's sitemaps and the live pages on 31 October 2026. Every count below comes from them.
A hub, then a folder per sub-topic
The Agile Coach starts at atlassian.com/agile, a "What is Agile?" page with a sidebar headed Agile topics. Each entry in that sidebar is a folder of its own: /agile/scrum/ with 17 URLs, /agile/kanban/ with 6, /agile/project-management/ with 79, /agile/product-management/ with 45, and smaller ones for software development, teams, tutorials and agile at scale.
That gives Atlassian two levels of cluster. /agile/ is the parent topic. /agile/scrum/ is a child with its own hub, "What is Scrum?", and its own spokes: sprints, sprint planning, ceremonies, backlogs, retrospectives, roles. The breadcrumb markup on each page follows the same path (Atlassian, Agile, Scrum, Sprints), so the URL, the breadcrumb and the sidebar tell Google the same thing about where a page belongs.
The sidebar carries the internal linking. Every page we opened links to more than 200 Agile Coach URLs. A reader on the sprints page reaches standups in one click, and a crawler that lands anywhere in /agile/ finds the rest.
Where the folders stop matching the topics
Open the project management folder in the sitemap and Scrum shows up again: scrum-board, scrum-values, 3-pillars-scrum, scrum-tools, sprint-backlog, sprint-cadence, sprint-demo, velocity-scrum and four more. Twelve pages about Scrum live under /agile/project-management/. Kanban splits the same way: six URLs in /agile/kanban/, with kanban-metrics and kanban-principles filed under project management.
The Scrum board guide shows the cost on screen. Its breadcrumb reads Agile, Project Management, Scrum Board. The sidebar opens it under Agile project management with the Scrum section folded shut. And the template box at the top of a page about Scrum boards offers the Jira Kanban template.
Some of the pairs this creates overlap. /agile/scrum/backlog-refinement, the "Backlog refinement guide", and /agile/project-management/backlog-refinement-meeting, "How to master backlog refinement meetings", chase close to the same query from two folders. Sprint planning has the same shape, with /agile/scrum/sprint-planning on one side and sprint-planning-tools on the other. When Google swaps two pages on one query month after month, that's keyword cannibalization, and split folders make it slower to spot because the two pages never show up in the same filter.
How to track a topic cluster that has sub-folders
Nesting is the part worth copying. A parent folder gives you one number for the whole subject, and each child folder gives you one number per sub-topic, from the same Search Console report. Four filters cover it.
- The parent. Performance report, Page filter, URL contains /agile/. Impressions and clicks for the whole subject: the line you report upward.
- Each child. URL contains /agile/scrum, then /agile/kanban. Compare the children month on month and you see which sub-topic carries the parent.
- The strays. A custom regex that adds the pages filed elsewhere:
/agile/(scrum($|/)|project-management/(scrum|sprint|3-pillars-scrum|velocity-scrum|backlog-refinement)). That pattern picks up the 17 pages in the folder and the 12 outside it. Keep the list in the same sheet as your cluster plan, or the next stray page drops out of the numbers without anyone noticing. - One market at a time. Atlassian mirrors the Agile Coach in 11 more languages, from /de/agile/ to /zh/agile/, 2,429 localized URLs in all. URL contains /agile/scrum matches all 12 versions together, 204 URLs. To read the English cluster alone, anchor the pattern to the domain:
^https://www\.atlassian\.com/agile/scrum.
Read each filter the way rank tracking for a topic cluster works anywhere: impressions, the number of URLs that earned at least one, and how many tracked queries sit in the top 10. Give the tracker's keyword tags the same parent and child names as the folders, so the tracker and Search Console describe the same groups.
What to copy, and what to check first
Copy the shape: a hub with real copy, a child folder per sub-topic, a sidebar that shows the whole tree, breadcrumbs that match the URL. Then audit the filing. Export your sitemap, sort the URLs by folder, and read the slugs under each one. A slug that names another folder's topic is a page your cluster report can't see. Atlassian has 14 of them across Scrum and Kanban in a 222-page section. A 30-page blog might have two, and two is enough to make a sub-topic look weaker than it is.
Moving a page later costs a redirect, so pick the folder before the brief is written. When a page fits two folders, file it with the hub that should link to it first.
If you want your clusters filed so one filter reports each of them, that's the kind of work we do. Send us your sitemap and we'll show you where the strays are.
