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
-
Google Parsing jQuery Links as Real Links
While trying to diagnose a recent Google penalty I found out that links were being parsed by Google even though they were made using jQuery. I had the linkify plugin on my site and configured it to convert URLs to links on all of my pages. Today I found links to other sites of mine from sites that should not have been linking to them and found that the links came from pages whose links were generated via jQuery. This makes me wonder, how do I know if Google is counting javascript generated links? Is it possible that my native ad widgets are creating links that Google might count? Since I don't own any of the sites that advertise via the widgets I don't know how to tell if they are getting link juice or not. It used to be that Google didn't parse javascript, so you could add as many links to your site via javascript as you wanted without being seen by Google as linking to those sites. Does anyone know of a jQuery plugin that does turn URLs into clickable links that Google won't parse as real links?
On-Page Optimization | | STDCarriers0 -
How do you find out all the keywords Google is ranking you for?
Hello, Is there anyway of finding out all the keywords that Google is currently ranking our website for so that we can then build on those keyword positions? Many thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | mblsolutions0 -
Sudden disappearance from google organic ranking
I have been ranked in top 5 for all relevant search terms for years. I have been in business for 25 years and am modestly speaking the best in our field. The name of my company is "Alaska Yacht Charters" and suddenly I have disappeared from Google search. Google "alaska yacht charters" and I am nowhere to be found. This all occured within days of my suspending my adwords account which I felt I didn't need because of my great organic ranking. What has happened?Geoff Wilson www.alaskanyachtcharters.com
On-Page Optimization | | akstory0 -
Factors that Affect Alexa Ranking?
Hi All,
On-Page Optimization | | PrasanthMohanachandran
Can any one please help in the factors that effects Alexa ranking.
My website Alexa rank got increased at all of sudden. It was 600000 last month it got increased to 1000000 by today and i cant even find the rank in own country which was 22000 before. Please help me in this, my organic traffic and over all traffic is constant only, how ever my website got effected. Please suggest me on this0 -
Too many outbound links on a page?
We have a "Clients" page on our site with approximately 125 of our clients listed. We have a link to each client's website, so that's 125 links. I am rethinking this approach. Is there any value to having these outbound links? The SEOmoz PRO analysis tells me I have too many links on this page. I have read that more than 100 links on a page is too many, but that seemed to be referring to internal links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
I have two pages ranking for the same keyword.
The index page and the targeted landing page for that keyword. They have different content, title, meta but I am competing with myself for the main keyword in the industry. What is the best way to fix this? 301 the keyword page to the index page?
On-Page Optimization | | Aftermath_SEO0 -
Why would my homepage be ranked lower (Page Rank 2) than my other pages on the site (PR3) ?
Why would my homepage be ranked lower (Page Rank 2) than my other pages on the site (PR3) ?
On-Page Optimization | | dmurtagh0 -
Nofollow on these internal links?
On an x-cart ecommerce website we have, seomoz has picked up a lot of duplicate content, based on URLs that are different, but are essentially the same page. These come from Fitlers, that allow a page to show only certain colours and styles, reordering page by price etc, and also the page 2, page 3 etc of a category: All the below are '4ft-bedding.html' http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?filter=1&value=Pink http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?page=2 http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?sort=price&view_all=Y I've now changed all these internal links to rel="nofollow" on the a tag. Is that the correct and best way to sort? I might be mistaken on when I did this update and when the last report was ran, but on the SEOmoz crawling report, it still has the above as problem pages. thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | rowleysit-2598920