To Many Links On Page

[Mike.Bean]

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!

www.Ocelco.com

[Mike.Bean]

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!

[stevefidelity]

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.

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[Mike.Bean]

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!

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[rkbillin]

agree with UI comments and simplifying - it will improve all aspects user experience and machine ( spyder scanning)

[Mike.Bean]

Thank you very much, hopefully the next time my pages get crawled it will be without those errors.

[Danapollo]

I second that rule of 7! I was trying to remember what it was called when writing my response - thanks for jogging my memory!

[stevefidelity]

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.

[Danapollo]

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