Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. On-Page Optimization
    4. Best structure for a news website including main menu nav

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Best structure for a news website including main menu nav

    On-Page Optimization
    2
    4
    1637
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • sam_legmark
      sam_legmark last edited by

      Just looking for thoughts and opinions on the best way to set up the main nav on a news website that covers a specific professional services sector.

      There are news items, archived news, blog, events, but also main menu links to the numerous news categories that go to a page listing the news articles under that category (as created in Wordpress when publishing the article).

      I'm thinking that having these off the main nav is diluting the juice to the more important pages including the events and the news page?

      Just thinking about how to rearrange and consolidate.  Any thoughts on how people would structure something like this?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • effectdigital
        effectdigital last edited by

        Not a problem, I always try to give a solid answer 🙂

        Maybe you could do a compromise and have a "categories" entry that breaks down into the main categories (but not all of them) or something like that. Always remember, you can hedge your bets to test a bit!

        Having every news category in the top-line nav, breaking down into sub categories could be excessive. It's a shame that triple-expansion nav never caught on (then you could have categoires->category->sub-category on hover). Whilst that is technically feasible, it's not really very user friendly (at all) as it makes menus really jumpy and dysfunctional (in most instances anyway)

        On lots of eCommerce sites now I notice that they have auto-completing product (or category) based pseudo-search bars. Like you'll type a bit of a word, and all the relevant products will come back and you click on one (instead of 'entering' the search, and seeing a page of results). Maybe you could innovate and create a similar thing for news stuff. Have people type a bit of a category (or tag / topic) and then pre-fill with a couple of categories and a load of articles (or something like that)

        Just throwing out ideas. Not that yours is bad! Just always trying to think "how could this be more?"

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • sam_legmark
          sam_legmark @effectdigital last edited by

          Thanks - very detailed response and much appreciated.

          This news site currently gets 40,000-50,000 users per month so there's already some good traffic numbers coming through.

          The difference with this and the virgin structure is that all those pages lower down the URL structure will continue to be relevant for that site.  Most of the users coming to this site are finding the latest news articles or know the brand already (direct traffic).

          I think that it would be best to put all the different categories as a list on a 'news categories' page rather than have them all listed out on the main nav and distracting from the main areas of 'latest news' and 'events'.

          Definitely food for thought there though.  Fingers crossed it works!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • effectdigital
            effectdigital last edited by

            This is a pretty good question and the answer can be variable depending upon the level of authority which your domain has currently accrued.

            One of our employees always touts this site (not one of our clients) as having superb navigation:

            • https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/

            There are several aspects to the navigation and URL structure - and how those different elements interact.

            Even the faceted navigation impacts the URL structure, for example you can build very specific (niche) URLs like this just using the on-site UI:

            • https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/multiple-car-experiences/yorkshire-and-humber/100-250/4-stars

            So if you wanted to see driving 'experience days' for multi-car experiences (drive more than one car) within Yorkshire and Humber, which were between £100 and £250 with a 4-star or higher rating... the pages listed there would be the ones!

            If you load that page, you can see that all of those things have been set in the sidebar based filtering (faceted) navigation. WordPress has issues in terms of reflecting faceted navigational choices properly in the URL structure, especially when more than faceted navigation filter is active. You then have to choose between pretty permalinks  or having multiple filters accessible to users simultaneously, not ideal. Due to that I'm pretty sure some kind of bespoke (or heavily customised) CMS would have been used to get everything all working in one place as it should.

            In addition to all that neat stuff, if you hover over the top menu entries you'll see that they expand and are pretty comprehensive. That's called a 'mega' menu and re-distributes SEO authority very efficiently, so long as all of the links are accessible in the 'base' (non-modified) source code. Surely this is just the way to go for everyone right?

            WRONG!

            The cited website obviously has the backing of Virgin and some pretty colossal promotional activity going on behind the scenes. That's not insider info, Virgin is a huge multinational corporation! Anyone examining their backlink profile using publicly available data would say the same thing.

            If you're not already riding a very high SEO authority stream, chances are that this type of navigation could actually lower your ranking results.

            If you have loads of authority, you can tip it down channels to really soak up a lot of long-tail traffic with this very granular type of site-architecture which leverages great navigational/URL-structure interplay.

            On the other hand, if you are a smaller site (of any description) - it's like using an irrigation system with only one bucket of water to supply it. That bucket could have kept 2-3 plants alive for a few days, but spread evenly among hundreds of crops it makes literally no difference (and everything dies together, oh no!)

            Implementing very advanced navigational structures too early can sometimes cause your small amount of SEO authority to 'bleed out' and achieve relatively little (or nothing) over thousands of pages.

            It's great to be ambitious, and all of these great tactics can work (on any site, not just news or experience-day sites) but they all have a proper time of adoption. Adopt too early and you risk flattening your prior achievements in a void of poor results. Adopt too late and you risk being left behind as your peers take a chance and (potentially) make something more of themselves

            It's not just what you do, it's when you do it (if that makes sense)

            On a news site, or any other site - I'd say start simpler and as you accrue more SEO authority, redistribute it and gradually increase depth of navigation, URL structure and content granularity

            Here is your basic decision:

            1. Flatter URL structure and condensed nav helps the site build up authority and win a few mid-to-high tier terms
            2. Deeper URL structure with expansive nav helps reap the long-tail and gain massive amounts of traffic, but only once your SEO authority reaches a certain threshold. Before that point, you'll just bleed out

            Hope that helps

            sam_legmark 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • TeodorMarin

              What to do to index all my links of my website?

              Ok, i have a new website, with only 14.000 page indexed by google, but the potential is big, 1-2 million pages. What i have to do, to force somehow google to index my website faster? This is my website: https://vmag.ro/

              On-Page Optimization | | TeodorMarin
              0
            • viatrading1

              URL Structure on Category Pages

              Hi, Currently, we having the following URL Structure o our product pages: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/283/All_Products.html Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/4/Clothing.html Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/LOAD-HE-WOM/Assorted-High-End-Women-Clothing-Lots.html?cid=4 Since we are going to use another frontend system, we are thinking about re-working on this URL Structure, using something like this: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/ Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/product-title/ I understand this is better for SEO and user experience. However, we already have good traffic on the current URL Structure. Should we use same left-side filters on Category Pages as in All Products Page? Since we are using Faceted Navigation, when users filter the Category (e.g. Clothing) they will see same page as Clothing Category Page. Is that an issue for Duplicate Content? Since we are a wholesale company - I understand is using "/wholesale/products/" in URL for all product pages a good idea? If so, should we avoid word "wholesale" in product-title to avoid repeated word in URL? For us, SKU in URL helps the company employees and maybe some clients identify the link. However, what do you think of using the SEO-friendly product-title, and 301 redirect it to www.viatrading.com/BRTA-LN-DISHRACKS/, so 1st link is only used by company members and Canonicalized 2nd is the only one seen by general public? Thank you,

              On-Page Optimization | | viatrading1
              0
            • CostumeD

              H1 tag- on home page - what is it best to include

              is it best to have in the H1 tag 1. just our website address 2. combination of website address followed by short keywords about our website

              On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD
              0
            • Uinterview

              Linking to External Site In Nav Bar

              Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks

              On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview
              0
            • PorshaAndrea

              When writing content for a website what is the optimal copy length?

              My site is currently in the mist of a redesign and I’d like us to compile some recommendations on the length of copy for a page to rank well but can't seem to find any up to date articles on this.Does anyone have any suggestions, comments, or feedback?Thank you.

              On-Page Optimization | | PorshaAndrea
              0
            • cookie777

              Bold & Italics Best Practice?

              Hi All, Does anyone know the official best practice use of bold and italic fonts? If I have a long page of text- 800 words + I usually bold a few sentences to allow the user to be able to read only the bold on the page, and still make sense of the article. By reading all the bold it will kind of make sense and the user gets the point of the article. This wasn't really done for SEO purposes, but so the reader gets to the bottom of the page in a reasonable amount of time, and gets all the key points and facts of the article. I was advised not to do this and to just bold/italic the keyword/phrases the article was written to rank for. I would like to know anyone else's opinion/strategy on using bold/italics effectively and within best practices. What's the official word? Thank you for your help. Ian

              On-Page Optimization | | cookie777
              0
            • OOMDODigital

              Meta Geotag - two locations on one website

              I have a client that I would like to do a Meta Geotag for. They have two locations. Am I able to do two meta geotags on their website? Thanks!

              On-Page Optimization | | OOMDODigital
              0
            • rohanarora536

              Which is Best Practice for creating URLs for subdomain?

              My website is related to education. We have created sub domains for all major colleges, universities & Entrance exams like Gre, Toefl ETC. for eg:  amityuniversity.abc.com (Amity is Name of University ) Now if have to mention city name in URL as well (college is located in multiple locations) amityuniversity-delhi.abc.com
              amityuniversitydelhi.abc.com Now my Q is can we use hyphens in sub domains if we have to add city name or shall we create without using any  hyphens. In Directory  structure we can always separate words with hyphens, can we follow same practice in subdomain as well Which is a  best URL for subdomain amity-university-delhi.abc.com
              amityuniversity-delhi.abc.com
              or amityuniversitydelhi.abc.com

              On-Page Optimization | | rohanarora536
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.