To Many Links On Page
-
I'm having a problem on a crawl warning for our main site. The warning is that every one of my pages has to many links, a little over 1,000 on almost all of them.
I think this is because our category list on our left hand sidebar has so many categories, and that sidebar appears on every last one of our pages even all the way into our products.
Can anyone take a look and tell me if this is the reason why and what I could possibly do about this?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thank You,
I will begin this process next, this is the one that will take some time. The main categories shouldn't be to big of an issue to switch around but we have a LOT of subcategories. In the end it will all be worth it.
Thanks again for all the help!
-
Good to see some quick changes implemented on your end. Definitely much better than before. Again, try grouping all of those product categories in your side nav into 7-10 'sub categories'. Wheelchairs for example. It looks like you've got 4 wheelchair categories. Group that into 'Wheelchairs & Wheelchair accessories', then when the user clicks on that link, they can further refine their search.
-
Ah, got it - late to the party, as usual
I strongly suspect it'll make a noticeable difference, but give it some time and collect data like a madman.
-
I redid the side navigation bar as recommend by others. Almost every category had a drop down menu that led to many more links. Now it only shows the base categories and hopefully that will solve the problem!
Thanks!
-
Did you modify the site recently? I'm only seeing about 74 links on the home-page.
In general, I think the other commenters raise good points - 100 links isn't a hard limit, but there's a fundamental truth for both search spiders and human visitors: the more links you have, the less love each link gets. It's always a balancing act, but building a more heirarchical approach can focus attention and internal PR at the top. For 74 links, it's just tweaks (I think you could improve the left side-bar a bit). For 1,000 links, I'd definitely consider a new information architecture.
-
agree with UI comments and simplifying - it will improve all aspects user experience and machine ( spyder scanning)
-
Thank you very much, hopefully the next time my pages get crawled it will be without those errors.
-
I second that rule of 7! I was trying to remember what it was called when writing my response - thanks for jogging my memory!
-
There's no hard & fast rule to how many links you want to have on a page, but if I had to toss out a number, you don't want it over 100 per page. There's likely a strong correlation with pages with hundreds or thousands of links on a given page and the spammy quality of the site.
Your issue in my opinion isn't as much an SEO issue as it is a usability issue. Your side navigation is just WAY too much. Once you click on one of those navigation items, you the user should be taken to another page. There's just way too much text there and it's difficult to read - it's difficult for the user to take in that information.
Try to follow 'The Rule of 7'. If you go beyond 7 items in a side navigation menu like that, it becomes increasingly difficult to take all of that information in. You should ideally try to divide up all of your products into about 7-10 categories. Those are the categories that you display in the side navigation menu. Then, when the user click on one of those items, they're taken to another page.
-
One possible solution would be to add the 'family' of pages you currently list to your sitemap page, and just have your 'parent' pages listed on the sidebar.
People coming to your site will only visit the 'children' pages through exact-match search terms or through their user journey, so you needn't worry about listing everything on the homepage. Your homepage is there to help entice people to look further - let them discover your other products easily, rather than being given a list of options they must choose from.
That's an opinion - not a solution, really, but it gives you an option at least! Your site would be cleaner and easier to crawl if you just had the parent pages in the sidebar
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Combining products - edit existing product page or 301 redirect to new page?
We want to combine existing products - e.g. 'hand lotion' and 'body lotion' will become 'hand & body lotion'. As such, we'll need to combine the two product pages into one. What would be the best route to take in terms of SEO to do this? My initial reaction is to create a new product page and then 301 or 302 redirect the old products to the new product page depending on if the change is permanent or temporary. Would you agree? Or am I missing something?
On-Page Optimization | | SwankyApple1 -
Which page will rank higher, my main article or the sub article linking from it?
Hi all, Can you help me figure this one out? I'm currently creating content for my website and I very badly want to know which page will rank higher in Google, my main article that has some keywords that are and links to my sub-article, or my sub-article which is optimized for those keywords? I will demonstrate with an example since I'm not sure my question is clear: If I have an article that talks about different kinds of candy and it links to a sub-article that will elaborate on specific candies like a mint candy ,which page will rank for mint candies. Until today I believed that if my sub-article which is linked from my main-article will rank for mint candies since it gets the support from my main article.Lately when experimenting this I found my thoughts to be wrong. Can anyone help me with this one?Any insights? Thanks, Leebi
On-Page Optimization | | Leebi0 -
Homepage canonical url with splash or not with splash? All other links are without but logo links with splash
Hello, There is so much contradicting information about the homepage canonical URL. Many websites have all the links without the trailing splash but their homepage URL still contains the splash. Now Moz is an example with this. Their urls don't have the splash, and their canonical does not have the splash. Why is it so and why so much different ways people have it?
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
Keyword Appearing on Home Page - Moz Page Grader
Hi Today I entered www.partydomain.co.uk through the Moz Page Grader and found that the Home Page is Ranked B. I noticed that an Area we could improve on is the amount of times we are using our main keyword "Fancy Dress" on the home page. Please can you take a look at www.partydomain.co.uk and scroll to the bottom of the page were the tabs are containing losts of content. I am thinking about removing all of thoose Tabs. Our Competitors dont have any content as such on the home page and are ranking higher than Party Domain for "fancy dress" What do you think ? remove all the tabs to be like the others that rank better? Or cut the text right down ? Thanks Adam
On-Page Optimization | | AMG1000 -
Question Re Cornerestone Page And Anchor Text For Internal/External Links
Suppose I create a cornerstone page with the targeted keyword "Dog Collars". I write a dozen articles on various dog collars and point a link from each article to my cornerstone page. Should the anchor text for the links from each of those articles to the cornerstone page be "Dog Collars" or should they vary, but still be relevant to "Dog Collars" for best SEO? Should half of them be "Dog Collars" and the other half various? Also, if I have 12 articles and all of the anchor text is already "Dog Collars", should I go back and change them so that they all don't say the same thing? If hope my question makes sense ... thanks in advance. I will give thumbs up for helpful responses and suggestions 😉
On-Page Optimization | | Humanovation0 -
Home page keyword effecting internal page ranking
Hello, My client has a second keyword for the home page that is competitive. The home page is not being ranked for this keyword. Instead, an internal category page is ranking. This internal category page is more relevant than the home page - it shows the categories for the actual products that this term refers to. But everyone around us in Google's page results has far more backlinks than the internal page, and we're all heavily optimized for this term. My question is, is it safe to pull the second term off of the home page or is this internal page strong because it is somehow being strengthened by the home page optimization?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Should one page with markers or six separate pages?
Hi - I'm working on a site that was set up with 6 bios on one page, with markers jumping to each person's name. I was thinking about separating those into 6 different pages, but not sure if that's the right thing to do. Advice about keeping the bios on one page vs splitting them up? (Am I more likely to rank for those peoples' names if I have a unique page, or is the one page url with each different marker in it, just as good?) Ranking well for those names isn't a huge goal of the site, but it would be nice to make the choice that would help with that rank. Thanks for your input Emma
On-Page Optimization | | emmas0 -
E-Commerce product pages that have multiple skus with unique pages.
Hey Guys, With the recent farm/panda update from google i'm at a cross roads as to how I should optimize product pages for a project i'm working on for a client. My client sells tires and one particular tire brand can have up to 15 models and each model can have up to 30 sizes. IE: 'Michelin Pilot Sport Cup' comes in 15 different sizes. Each size will have it's unique product page and description bringing me to my question. Should I use the same description on every size? I do plan on writting unique content for each tire model however i'm not sure if I should do it for every size. After all the tire model description is the same for every size, each size doesn't carry any unique characteristics that I can describe. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | MikeDelaCruz770