Site Navigation
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav.
Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are:
1. Category
ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden
2. Subcat
ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath
3. Family
ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories
Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them.
Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts?
Thanks!
-Zack
-
Thanks Takeshi thats good advice, I am going to try and figure out how to test it.
-
My personal preference when it comes to navigation is fewer options than too many. The tendency is to want to put everything in there, "just in case", but most users will not even click on a fraction of those links, and you can end up confusing people with too many options.
I would install a click tracker such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale (or use Google in-page analytics) to figure out which links people are actually using, and then remove the ones people aren't clicking on as much. I'm also a big fan of changing the navigation based on what section of the site you are, so when you're on the homepage the navigation might only display the top level categories, but when you drill down it shows you more categories.
As for SEO impact, there are both pros and cons. On the one hand, you reduce the number of links per page (general recommendation is around 100 links per page), but you will no longer be linking to those sub-sub-categories from your home page. My suggestion, as with any large sitewide change, would be to test it. Test removing the links for a week or two, and see if it has any impact on SEO or user metrics. Then decide whether to keep them or leave them based on actual data.
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
-
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Is SEO as Effective on AJAX Sites?
Hey Everyone, I had a potential client contact me about doing SEO for their site and I see that they have an AJAX site where all the content is rendered dynamically via AJAX. I've been doing SEO for years, but never had a client with an AJAX site. I did a little research and see how you can setup alternative pages (or snapshots as Google calls them) with the actual content so the pages are crawlable and will get indexed, but I'm wondering if that is as effective as optimizing static HTML pages or if Google treats AJAX page alternatives as less trustworthy/valuable. Also, does having the site in AJAX effect link building and social sharing? With the link structure, it seems there could be some issues with pointing links and passing link juice to internal pages Thanks! Kurt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kurt_Steinbrueck1 -
Why is this site not indexed by Google?
Hi all and thanks for your help in advance. I've been asked to take a look at a site, http://www.yourdairygold.ie as it currently does not appear for its brand name, Your Dairygold on Google Ireland even though it's been live for a few months now. I've checked all the usual issues such as robots.txt (doesn't have one) and the robots meta tag (doesn't have them). The even stranger thing is that the site does rank on Yahoo! and Bing. Google Webmaster Tools shows that Googlebot is crawling around 150 pages a day but the total number of pages indexed is zero. It does appear if you carry out a site: search on Google however. The site is very poorly optimised in terms of title tags, unnecessary redirects etc which I'm working on now but I wondered if you guys had any further insights. Thanks again for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iProspect-Ireland0 -
Disavowing Links for Subcategory of Site
Has anyone tried using Google's Disavow tool with only a specific subcategory of their site? We're an ecommerce company and our site took a small hit with this recent Penguin update. We're certain previous linkbuilding efforts are the cause. But we'd like to try the Disavow tool with 1 subcategory to start, see if our rankings for that category improve (we used to be top 3, now ~12 or 13), and if so then roll it out through the rest of the site. Looking for input from others on if they have any experience with this or if it'd be better to just go for the whole thing at once. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
Linking to bad sites
Hi, I just have a quick question. Is it very negative to link to "bad" sites, such as online pharmacies, dating, adult sites, that sort of stuff? How much does linking to a "bad" site negatively affect a "good" site? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Help with a Sticky Site
Hey Everyone - I work for a company that is just getting into SEO. We have had some successes, but one project lately has got us stumped. We have been working hard, but have been unable to make an impact in Google rankings with the following site: http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/index.cfm/DesMoines We are trying to optimize for the keyword phrase, "des moines hotel" This hotel is a branch location of a hotel chain in the Midwest. *Note we've already moved up some other branch locations for this hotel chain successfully. We've used several tools including the SEOmoz tool and seem to have higher marks than those sites that rank above us in Google surprisingly. Any idea what we're missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markhope0 -
SEO Consultant for site audit
Can someone recommend an excellent SEO who can perform a full site audit of my fairly large Wordpress site? The site receives about 14,000 visits per month but traffic is waining one month after a recent change. Need analysis of some funky stuff in my Webmaster tools and overall site review.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0