Navigation
-
I've been wrestling with this one for a while. Take a standard small web site navigation with nav links for:
-
Products
-
Solutions
-
Support
-
Learning Center
I believe having drop downs to show the sub-pages of each category provides a better user experience, but it also bloats my links per page in the navigation from 4 to 24. Most of the additional links are useful for user experience, but not search purposes. So, 2-years after Google's changing of how it treats nofollows (which used to be the easy answer to this question), what is considered best practice?
A) Go ahead and add the full 24 nav links on each page. The user experience outweighs the SEO benefits of fewer links and Google doesn't worry too much about nav links relative to main body links.
B) Stick to only 4 nav options. Having 20 additional links on every page is a big deal and removing them is worth the user experience hit. I can still get to all levels of this small site within 2-3 clicks and do cross category linking to mitigate silos.
C) Use some technical voodoo with js links or iframes to hide the nav links from Google and get the best of both worlds.
D) Do something that is not one of the first three choices.
Does anyone feel strongly about any of the above options or is this a user-preference type of situation where it doesn't make much difference which option you choose on a small 100-200 page site?
I'm really looking forward to everyone's thoughts on this.
-DV
-
-
Thanks, Alan, you captured the dilemma perfectly. UI is important and SEO is important, so how does one quantify the pros and cons of each in the planning stages of a site. It's really kind of an educated guess.
I tend to lean towards your assessment for all of the reasons you cite. I'm in a competitive keyword space. So while I put a lot of weight on UI issues, I'm not inclined to ignore SEO opportunities for just minimal UI gains.
-
Derek
There are hundreds of factors right, so there's no way to know with 100% certainty in advance what the SEO hit would be with the nav change. Any single change could have a significant impact, yet if all other core SEO factors are optimal, it might not have any impact at all. Without testing, no way to know.
Personally I prefer to avoid the possible hit when I recommend nav to clients just because I do want to squeeze out every last ounce of value and honestly, if a site really only has 20 - 30 nav links, it's not such an inconvenience to users to have to click a main nav link and then find the sub-nav in each section as long as it's visually presented well.
If the information provided is highly relevant, that one extra click is not going to hurt the site.
-
Interesting point about duplicate content. I suspect I'd have less of an issue with 20-30 links, but I could definitely see where DC could become a problem with larger navs. I like the breadcrumbs idea too.
I'm wondering if I'm placing too much emphasis on the too many links issue. However, to me it seems like a huge advantage to funnel link juice where I want it with well placed internal links in the body of content. I've had good success with this before. I would think that these targeted links would carry significantly more juice if I can reduce the number of links per page from 30 to 10 --- all by eliminating 20 nav links to less important pages. It just feels like a big SEO performance hit to me to have 200% more links in the nav? Am I wrong? Does Google not flow much link juice through nav links?
-
Derek
I encounter this scenario a lot on sites with not 24 but 100 or more links in that drop-down setup. Here's what I've found.
A) User Experience MAY be improved, however only heat-map and click testing can prove if this is the case or not, and only when you do a/b split testing on the two versions of navigation. Sometimes giving people these choices is only barely helpful unless you also supplement this with additional user experience signals to help someone know where they actually are, especially when they come directly into the middle of the site.
B) From an SEO standpoint, it's not so much a "too many links" issue for distributing individual link value. It's more a case where if you have all those links on every page of the entire site, at the code level, every page becomes slightly more diluted (all the extra text and words in the code) from a single-page topical focus issue. You also have more of a duplicate content potential (the top area of the page now has a lot more "content" that's not unique on every page of the site.
The way to address this, if you believe the site-wide drop-down nav is important, is by taking the following action:
-
Be sure you have proper microformat coded breadcrumb navigation directly within the top of the main content area on each page. This both helps users know more readily where they are in the site's content grouping and topical separation scheme, but also provides reinforced signals to search engines about content relationships that you lose with the top drop-downs.
-
Even with the top drop-downs, it's still beneficial to include section-specific navigation in a sidebar. When a user has so many choices on every page of the site, it's easy to get lost in knowing which drop-down to use. Not always, yet can be an issue. Giving them the alternative that's always visible within each section, and unique to each section reinforces ease of navigation for those who prefer it. It also communicates to Google topical relationships between all the pages in the section those side navigation links show up in.
3) You may need to increase the depth of the actual content area descriptive paragraph based unique content.
-
-
I see where you are coming from, but with each required click you lose users. There are definitely times where I would sacrifice some usability for the sake of traffic, but accessibility is everything.
You are right on the mark with the give and take of SEO and user experience.
-
Thanks for the reply, but please allow me to play devil's advocate.
I generally subscribe to users first mantra too, but is using subnavs on category pages vs. full dropdowns on every page a huge user experience hit? Taken to extremes, always choosing either a users always first approach or a SEO always first approach is not optimal. There has to be some measure of balance even if you lean heavily towards the users first approach (as I generally do).
Is there no meaningful benefit to removing from every page 20 links that provide no additional SEO benefit and only serve to dilute the impact of other more important links? Or, do you think that using full dropdown navs provides a truly significant user experience benefit?
-
A. You have to create it with users in mind. It will also help the site's connectivity which is good for SEO. Above all else the site should be easy to navigate for users.
-
I should add that the 24 link scenario already includes consolidation of related topics, so the answer can't be more consolidation!
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
-
Navigation Menu - Whats too much
Ive always had pages set up for a lot of our products and had these in the navigation menu. For instance we sell Solar Control Window Film which helps with heat, glare and UV. We then have a navigation menu something like this: Solar Window Film
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fozzy1609
Heat Control window Films
Anti glare window film
UV window film
etc etc Ihave this for all my services and products. I have unique content on each. My question is this. Would I be better having the naviation menu with links to all the seperate services we offer
OR
Should I have it linking to the main services and then the related services from within the page> For example Ill have just Solar Window Film in the navigation and then on the page it would internally link to the heat related section and the glare related section etc. Im wondering whether my sub pages would suffer because theyre not linked to from every page with the second method or whether it would help in some way0 -
Mega Menu Navigation Best Practice
First off, I'm a landscape/nature/travel photographer. I mainly sell prints of my work. I'm in the process of redesigning my website, and I'm trying to decide whether to keep the navigation extremely simple or leave the drop-down menu for galleries. Currently, my navigation is something like this: Galleries
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg1
> Gallery for State or Country (example: California)
> Sub-region in State or Country (example: San Francisco)
Blog
Prints
About
Contact Selling prints is the top priority of the website, as that's what runs the business. I have lots of blog content, and I'm starting to build some good travel advice, etc. but in reality, the galleries, which then filter down to individual pages for each photo with a cart system, are the most important. What I'm struggling to decide is whether to leave the sort of "mega menu" for the galleries, or to do away with them, and have the user go to the overall galleries page to navigate further into the site. Leaving the mega menu intact, the galleries page becomes a lot less important, and takes out a step to get to the shopping cart. However, I'm wondering if the amount of galleries in the drop down menu is giving TOO many choices up front as well. I also wonder how changing this will affect search. Any thoughts on which is better or is it really just a matter of preference?0 -
Main Menu Navigation appearing twice in the HTML version?
Hi mozzers, I am running an audit and I noticed that the nav is appearing twice in the code (can't see it on the Text version). When looking closely at the code there is an Item called Menu (screenshot2 attached) pointing to www.example.com/#mobile-menu that is right in between both main menus. I am assuming that the second nav is for the mobile version? Is this normal to display it this way or not? If it is why is it displayed so? Thanks! k9Rg0YL.png u7VXcw6.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Primary Navigation: Keep All Links Or Keep Top Level
Our eCommerce site www.towelsrus.co.uk employees a primary navigation system which we can enable to as many categories or not as we link. If all categories are enabled it adds roughly another 50 to 60 followed links per page giving all pages roughly 150 followed links (Google suggests no more than 100 per page). If I enable just top level navigation then this reduces them all considerably. Personally from the customer experience I think its better for them all to be visible, however from an SEO perspective and link juice perhaps not. Thought and opinions much appreciated here. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Best method to update navigation structure
Hey guys, We're doing a total revamp of our site and will be completely changing our navigation structure. Similar pages will exist on the new site, but the URLs will be totally changed. Most incoming links just point to our root domain, so I'm not worried about those, but the rest of the site does concern me. I am setting up 1:1 301 redirects for the new navigation structure to handle getting incoming links where they need to go, but what I'm wondering is what is the best way to make sure the SERPs are updated quickly without trashing my domain quality, and ensuring my page and domain authority are maintained. The old links won't be anywhere on the new site. We're swapping the DNS record to the new site so the only way for the old URLs to be hit will be incoming links from other sites. I was thinking about creating a sitemap with the old URLs listed and leaving that active for a few weeks, then swapping it out for an updated one. Currently we don't have one (kind of starting from the bottom with SEO) Also, we could use the old URLs for a few weeks on the new site to ensure they all get updated as well. It'd be a bit of work, but may be worth it. I read this article and most of that seems to be covered, but just wanted to get the opinions of those who may have done this before. It's a pretty big deal for us. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well Am I getting into trouble if I do any of the above, or is this the way to go? PS: I should also add that we are not changing our domain. The site will remain on the same domain. Just with a completely new navigation structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0 -
Best way to view Global Navigation bar from GoogleBot's perspective
Hi, Links in the global navigation bar of our website do not show up when we look at Google cache --> text only version of the page. These links use "style="<a class="attribute-value">display:none;</a>" when we looked at HTML source. But if I use "user agent switcher" add-on in Firefox and set it to Googlebot, the links in global nav are displayed. I am wondering what is the best way to find out if Google can/can not see the links. Thanks for the help! Supriya.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SShiyekar0 -
What if you can't navigate naturally to your canonicalized URL?
Assume this situation for a second... Let's say you place a rel= canonical tag on a page and point to the original/authentic URL. Now, let's say that that original/authentic URL is also populated into your XML sitemap... So, here's my question... Since you can't actually navigate to that original/authentic URL (it still loads with a 200, it's just not actually linkded to from within the site itself), does that create an issue for search engines? Last consideration... The bots can still access those pages via the canonical tag and the XML sitemap, it's just that the user wouldn't be able to access those original/authentic pages in their natural site navigation. Thanks, Rodrigo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlgoFreaks0 -
Should I nofollow the main navigation on certain pages?
We have several large Ecommerce sites with hundreds of links on each page. I have been trying to think of ways to focus our internal linking to increase certain pages relevancy. My thought was to put nofollow in the main navigation (since there are hundreds of links there controlled by dropdowns) and only follow the links on each page for the products we are selling and promoting (15-20 links). I would still be using a sitemap that includes the links. Is this a terrible idea? if a link is nofollowed in the main navigation does that still count as the one mention for google if it points to the same page that a normal link points too that is in the content of the page? since all of the main navigation is the same on every page of the website would it be good to only put nofollow on the subpages/subsections and leave the home page navigation alone (that would allow the spiders to crawl all of those links on the home page but not crawl those same links on the subsections where I could then focus the linking).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bigtimeseo0