Too many links because mega menu within wordpress

[Inbuilds]

I have a mega menu on my website with a lot of product categories. In my site analysis its coming up as a problem because there are too many links and its on every page. Is this something i should worry about or how should i correct it?

[WhoWuddaThunk]

The more options the worse actually.  Our brains aren't designed to interpret that many options at once, so minimizing the difficulty of decisions at each level helps.

The book "Don't Make Me Think," goes over the average visitors though process quite well, but here's my quick and dirty version:

-  Like a restaurant menu that has everything broken down.  People will quickly scan the menu looking for the classification of food that they want - appetizers, entrees, dinner, etc.

That's just like if they were on a website.  They quickly scan to find what they want, even if it's the at the most macro level, and click that.

-  Now, the next step depends on the size of the menu.  With a huge menu they will probably filter it down again by picking Beef, Chicken or Pasta.  On a small menu, though, they will probably have limited enough choices to be able to select their entree.

This is exactly like on your website.  If you only have a handful of options after the first click, then they will be able to select one.  However, if you have hundreds of options, such as a clothing store, then they will want to filter it down again.

This creates an optimal user experience, and helps focus your authority to your main category pages.  Linking to everything dwindles down the authority with too many internal links on each page, so it makes you spend a lot more time on link building then you actually needed.

Now, well established sites are a little different because they have so many external links pointing at them.  However, you will still see Amazon limit the number of links on it's home page to the main categories.  For example, on the home page they link to Children's Books, but not to Children's Books ages 6-8.  That's because more people search for Children's Books, and they want to make sure that the authority they pass from the home page goes to a page that is more useful to rank for.  Also, with the amount of time they spend analyzing their analytics you know they would adjust if the user experience suffered at all from designing it like this.

[Inbuilds]

Makes sense.

So as we see more and more ecommerce websites using larger menus with many options, I would think that these would actually improve the customer experience because the visitor is able to see more specific categories, thus getting to their destination quicker.... How are these websites getting around that and still performing well?

[WhoWuddaThunk]

The amount of authority a page can pass is divisible by the number of links.  So, let's say you have a site authority of around 100 (this is just a random number to make my math easier).  If a page can pass around 90% of it's authority to pages it links to, and you have 100 links on the page, then each page is going to receive about .9 points of authority.  However, if you dropped it down to 10 links, each page would get 9 points of authority.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Now, there are enough articles confirming that a page can pass around 85+% of it's authority, but there is no exact science when we test for correlation.  Regardless, the more links you have on a page will decrease the amount of authority each page receives.  So, if you want your next level pages to rank better, you should be inclined to decrease the number of links, especially on the home page, and try to pass more authority to those pages.

This also drops into the user experience problem.  People want to be able to find what they are looking for immediately.  A menu with 100 different options, including the drop downs, isn't going to help you achieve that results.  Instead, you would be better off creating the main menu options, the one you see on the home page, with 7 or fewer options.  That way people can quickly find where they are going.  Then, when they select one of those options they get an increase in available options on the next level.

This is what the Telegraph, who hired Distilled - one of the best SEO agencies out there, does: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

This creates an optimal user experience, as well as controlling how the page rank/authority/link juice flows through the website.  I believe Bruce Clay calls this process "creating a silo."

To do this easily in Wordpress look into conditional menus.