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
-
Hi,
Thanks for the video, a novelty to say the least. Again I think your response just further justifies the changes i am going to make to the primary nav.
Thanks again.
Regards
Craig
-
Hi Lucas,
Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Really appreciated.
In response to the URL structure, this is auto generated by the website, we do not have any control over the URL at all other than it taking the category or product name into account. Unfortunate as it would be nice to have shorter URL's across the site.
Any way, thanks again
-
Hey Craig,
Great Question. I have made a video response for you.
In Summary
The number of links per page used to matter a whole lot more a couple of years ago when Google wasn't as advanced as it now is. However, it is able to crawl much more deeply and quickly without the same constraints. With this in mind I would recommend that you put on as many links as is necessary for the customer or user to reach their desired goal. Don't worry about link juice or search engines being unable to read the full page. This is very much a thing of the past.
Hope this helps
-
My personal opinion here is that user experience is priority #1. Google wants sites to be user friendly before it wants you to optimize it, so that said - I would recommend that you maintain the category navigation in the menu. If you look at various ecommerce websites across the internet, Amazon.com - is one of many, many sites that do the same navigation style as yourself. I think that you're just fine and to continue. It's a great looking website.
Although, looking further, I wonder why your navigation style is like this? http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/bathrobes/catlist_fnct362.htm
Is it just an unchangeable facet of your Ecommerce platform? http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/bathrobes/ or http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/cat362/bathrobes/ or http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/362/bathrobes/ would be a little cleaner. Anyway - my personal opinion. Hope this helps.
Best,
Lucas
PS. Matt has a good blog post for you: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
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
-
Help in Internal Links
Which link attribute should be given to internal links of website? Do follow or No follow and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Do links to a domain that re-directs to my domain pass link equity?
Hi guys. We've recently taken control of a third-party site and we're going to set up a domain re-direct so any traffic comes to our site. With any existing links that the third-party site has, will these pass link equity to our main site through the redirect? Thanks, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Problem with internal links
Hello! Our domain, http://www.unionroom.com/, is having a strange issue with OSE in that it is telling us our internal pages aren't linking to one another. An example of this is that it is showing our About page ( http://www.unionroom.com/about/ ) only having three links, but this link appears twice on every single page on the website (~200 pages) in the header and footer. We've hung around for a little while to see if OSE would correct itself, but it hasn't and this now suggests that it may be an issue with our in-linking structure. Can anyone spot any issues with our build? The rest of the websites that we produce, that are all built in the same way, all have healthy internal linking structures according to OSE. Very confusing! Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unionroom0 -
Link masking in WordPress
in Wordpress, I want to block Google from crawling my site using the primary navigation. I want to use anchor text links in the body and custom menus in the sidebar to make maximum benefit of the "first link counts" rule. In short, I want to obfuscate all of the links in my primary navigation without using the dreaded nofollow. I do not want to block other links to the pages - body text, custom menus, etc. . This would be site wide. I'd rather not use Ajax or any type of programming unless it's part of a plugin. Can anyone make a simple, Google-friendly suggestion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Linking Within Website
Hello - I have about 10 landing pages that I am focusing on ranking for and I'm doing okay. My question is should I have all these pages on a drop down menu from my home page or is the innerlinking too much? http://www.kasplacement.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ksundheim10 -
Penguin or paid link penalty, or both?
Hello, I have a site, macpokeronline.com, that has seen dramatic decrease in visitors in the last few months, it has went down from 800 per day to 200 per day. It is a pretty complex situation. The site owner purchased paid links from reputable mac sites for years (they were more of followed advertisements, but were only there for SEO Purposes), now that i'm going through the link profligate ins OSE, I can see that a majority of their links come from these sites. There is also a branding issue, there are almost 15,000 links with the anchor text of "macpokeronline.com" These are obviously branded links, I don't know the best way to deal with them (though the majority are coming from the paid link sites) We have just sent the request in to remove the paid links from the sites, and i'm guessing since he is paying over $1000 a month for the links, they will be removed quickly. The site has been receiving significantly less traffic since penguin (apr 24-25) We received a message on July 19th which was the generic unnatural link warning, saying that once we remove links make a reconsideration request. Then on July 23rd, we received another message that says they are taking a "very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole" which I have never seen before. This damage was done before I was hired by this client, I just want to get his traffic back up so I can help him even further, I want to know more about the steps I should take. 1. I will definitely remove the paid ads What else should I do, thanks Zach
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BestOdds0 -
Navigation
An e-commerce site I am working on currently displays 6 Super-Categories with a drop down that contains about 100 Categories for items which filter down to sub-cats and then the actual products. The issue is that every page starts off with these 100+ links just in navigation alone. I can only assume this is crippling our ability to spread link juice efficiently. I have looked at larger sites that have moved towards side navigation. A few examples: *amazon.com *walmart.com *newegg.com My issue is that we would like to move towards less links on the homepage to funnel our incoming links more efficiently but I cannot figure out how large sites cope with this. As far as I can tell they are using side nav that disappears after selecting a category of item in which the navigation is replaced with filtering tools and the nav is hidden above (see the sites above). Is this the best way to handle this issue? Also is there a way to find out exactly what they are doing because I am trying to explain this to our IT person and I just get a response that our site is fine how it is and these navigation links don't affect anything...even though each page starts off with the same 100 follow links of navigation. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichealGooden0