Is a Mega Menu with over 300 links in it hurting my rankings?
-
I got hit pretty badly by Panda 4.0 (1/3 of my traffic lost), and I'm fairly certain it was because Google had potentially indexed over 20 million pages from a site filtering piece of software and got done for duplicate content. I have since fixed that using URL Parameters and that 20 million is down to 2.7 million now and I have submitted a clean site map, so now I wait.
I have just done a site relaunch and am trying to determine if there are any other issues. I run an online store, and I have a mega menu with well over 300 links in it - makes the user experience really quick and easy to jump exactly where you want - and then I have about 30 links in the footer.
I know there's a 'no more than 100 links on a page' guideline for Moz, but does anyone know if Google is smart enough to see the same header / footer navigation structure on every page of a site and know it's navigation and not water down the rest of the links, or do I need to re-think and simplify my navigation?
It's one of those things that's there for a user experience and now I'm worried that I'm being penalised.
The site is www dot shopnaturally dot com dot au
-
Much appreciated. Thank you.
-
Hi Joanne,
Sorry for not totally expanding on what I meant as the outcome using javascript! Yes, you're "hiding" portions of the mega menu. There is speculation that search engines might execute JS commands to find out if there is content behind them, but at the moment this still seems a valid way to "remove" links from Google's total link count. Keep and eye on whether this changes though (and acknowledge that it might not be totally reliable, even now).
Perhaps check out this tutorial for JS menus: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/menu/javascript.htm
Cheers,
Jane
-
HI Jane, further to the comment about M&S and Debenhams, I now understand what you mean by using a JS-powered navigation. While we can see it as users, the search engines can't see the endless links in the mega menu.
While having a phone consult with an SEO person today, he mentioned the same thing, using AJAX to hide that kind of information from Google so the users still get the experience of the content but Google isn't reading endless pieces of information it doesn't need.
I am a web developer, but not a high level programmer. Could you point me in the direction of where I should look as far as tutorials go so I can implement this in my site?
The links in the mega menu that I'll want to hide with AJAX are all readily available on main category pages and in breadcrumbs.
-
Yep, I would guess that your Panda issue was far more likely to have been the URLs than the menu - that's pretty standard Panda fare so that's great that you've sorted that out.
I am leaning towards really doubting that the menu is hurting you at all, but of course experimenting with removing non-essential menu items is possible. It's hard to draw real conclusions from the results you see after you modify something like a menu because other factors will influence rankings during that time, e.g. you gain or lose links, Google changes its treatment of unrelated metrics, your competitors gain or lose links, etc.
-
Thanks again. I've just noticed our rankings climb for a few phrases & keywords purely by doing internal keyword linking and writing quality blog posts. I'm sitting on the fence as to whether to ditch my mega menu or at least greatly simplify it. It provides ease of use for the end user to jump straight to the category they want, but if I'm losing traffic, then they're not on the site to use it.
Catch 22.
I've been watching a pile of Matt Cutts videos but haven't found one on this particular topic yet. I'm pretty sure my Panda issue was cough 20 million pages listed in URL Parameters from a poorly set up internal refine search feature that's been given the flick. We're down to 2.6 mil now and some of my rankings are slightly improving already.
-
I'm assuming these internal keyword links are a lot more effective if they're only competing against 100 links instead of 400+
In theory, kind of - one link out of 100 that uses the anchor text "natural skin care" will receive a higher percentage of the available passable PageRank than one link out of 400 using the same anchor text. The link from a page with just 99 other links should not be seen as any more relevant for the phrase "natural skin care" than the link from the 400-link page though. But it should receive more of a boost for that keyphrase than if it had to share the passable authority with three times the number of targets.
I am making an assumption here, so if anyone else knows that relevancy in internal anchor text goes up along with the division of passable PageRank, please chime in!
Google doesn't have the same reverence for anchor text that it had a few years ago, but most of its efforts in not relying so much on anchor text have been focused on inbound links from other websites, rather than internal links.
-
Fabulous answer Jane. Thank you so much
I think the thing I'm concerned about now is how well my internal keyword linking is going to work with 300+ links on each page. We're going to the trouble of rewriting a lot of content and doing some very specific internal keyword linking to help people move around the shop better and also for SEO purposes.
I'm assuming these internal keyword links are a lot more effective if they're only competing against 100 links instead of 400+ ?
-
Hi Joanne,
The "fewer than 100 links" quote is a little bit outdated in terms of what Google can actually handle. This article from late last year makes clear that the limit is long gone. The guideline is an okay benchmark when it comes to ensuring that you aren't overloading a page with useless or irrelevant content and links, but it's definitely not a requirement for crawling / indexing / ranking success anymore.
Your drop-down looks pretty standard to me. Some sites choose to present menus like this using JavaScript to call lower-level URLs (e.g. Hair, Face & Body + Natural Skin Care might be links in the HTML but then a JS call is required to bring up Certified Organic Skin Care, Cleansers, etc. - Google and other search engines do not traditionally execute JavaScript and thus won't see the links) but this is an increasingly unnecessary tactic, and could be detrimental if those URLs are not linked to in a crawlable manner elsewhere within the website.
Having a lot of links on a page has one "detriment" - a page does not "leak" PageRank / authority if it links out a lot, but it does mean that less PageRank passes through each link if there are hundreds of links, as opposed to 50 or 100 links. The total amount of PR that can be passed on is divided amongst more links. Again, it's important that links to all your pages be crawled so that those pages are indexed and receive authority, so I don't think you have to worry about this.
Further example: http://www.marksandspencer.com/ uses a JS-powered navigation, http://www.debenhams.com/ does not.
-
Nice website.
I would spend much more time getting quality, pertinent backlinks for your site from creating good content pieces which people want to share/link to.
Do you use canonical urls throughout the site?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Links in my website are indexed as separate pages
Hi All, We have pages which has names of people which we have created a Alink when clicked it goes to the related persons name. Now Google has indexed it as a seperate page example www.xyz.com/person/name www.xyz.com/person/name?alinks Now the same page is seen in google 2 times. How can i handle this please
On-Page Optimization | | jomin740 -
Does Google follow link path or url path when it comes to passing link juice
I noticed something with one of my sites and now I am thinking I made a boo boo (I think) here is what I have On my homepage I have 5 links Link1
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich
Link2
Link3
Link4
Link5 Links 1 - 4 go to a page and stops there. So my URL structure is www.mydomain.com/Link1
www.mydomain.com/Link2
www.mydomain.com/Link3
www.mydomain.com/Link4 So naturally my link juice passes down to these links evenly. Link5 also goes to another page, but on that page I have more links that go down further. www.mydomain.com/Link5 -> more links On page Link5 I have links that go to more pages, BUT my URL structure for these pages go like this Lets say on Link5 page I have another link that goes to AnotherLink1, AnotherLink2 and AnotherLink3 When you click on those links it takes you to those pages just fine, BUT my URL structure is like this www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink3 Basically I put all the "AnotherLink1-3" in the root directory as well. My question is concerning how Google passes the link Juice from my pages and if it is passing based on the path of the links and how they point to those pages, or do they pass link juice based on the URL structure. So since "AnotherLink1-3" is located in the root directory am I dividing my link juice from my home page to all the links as well based on the URL structure. For instance www.mydomain.com/Link1
www.mydomain.com/Link2
www.mydomain.com/Link3
www.mydomain.com/Link4
www.mydomain.com/Link5
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/AnotherLink3 Do I need to change my path for Link5 page to www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink1
www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink2
www.mydomain.com/Link5/AnotherLink3 ?0 -
Are My footer links bad?
I started working here recently, they said the footer links were to help with navigation of their most popular products. I am curious after reading http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond if having these footer links could hurt the ranking of those key words after the penguin update. I am looking more into the analytics, and have not seen a negative impact yet.
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
What is the best setup for conical Links
Should I have the conical link state: 1. www.autoinsurancefremontca.com 2. www.autoinsurancefremontca.com/index.html 3. autoinsurancefremontca.com Also do you need a conical link on each page if you have more than one page on your site?
On-Page Optimization | | Greenpeak0 -
To many links hurting me even though they are helping users
I have a scrabble based site where I function as a anagram solver, scrabble dictionary look up and tons of different word lists. In each of these word lists I link every word to my scrabble dictionary. This has caused Google to index 10018 pages total for my site and over 300 of them have well over 100 links. Many of them contain over 1000 links. I know Google's and SEOMOZ stance that anything over 100 will hurt me. I have always seen the warnings in my dashboard warning me of this but I have simply ignored it. I have posted on this Q and A that I have this issue, but IMO having these links benefit the users in the aspect that they don't have to worry about coping the text and putting it in the search box, they can simply click the link. Some have said if it helps the users then I am good, others have said opposite. I am thinking about removing these links from all these word lists to reduce the links per page. My questions are these. 1. If I remove the links from my page could this possible help me? No harm in trying it out so this is an easy question 2. If I remove the links then I will have over 9000 pages that are indexed with Google that no longer have a link pointing to them, except for the aspect that they are indexed with Google still. Is it going to hurt me if I remove these links and Google no longer sees them linked from my site or anywhere else?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Link Building
I have to be doing something wrong. I have been trying to get homes for sale in Casa Grande AZ, and Casa Grande Real Estate to rank well in google. However, I am dropping in rank. What am I doing wrong http://azbestlistings.com/casa-grande-az-real-estate-homes-for-sale-in-casa-grande-az
On-Page Optimization | | sansonj0 -
Navigation Links
Our developers typically have a CSS driven html menu at the top of the page with links to inside pages. They then have the same links in the footer. Does this double navigation cause any SEO issues or does Google disregard the second set of links? Thanks, Mark
On-Page Optimization | | DenverKelly0 -
Too many on-page links
I manualy counted the links on my website http://www.commensus.com which came to around 50, but SEO moz says I have over 100 and google isn't seeing them all.
On-Page Optimization | | jawl44630