Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
-
Hi,
I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store.
The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first.
a) Manual Observation
Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links.
Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal.
b) Link Sleuth
I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this -
Level Pages
0 1
1 42
2 860
3 3268
Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source).
Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2).
Thankyou!
-
Well, external links to pages are 80% of the ranking factor for the page. That has nothing to do with your internal nav link structure. But, yes, internal juice will flow 1/750th to each page that the nav structure points to.
-
From an SEO perspective, what about inbound links to the catalogue page? Wont the link power be spread over 750 links and then making the sub sub sub catalogue pages as equally powerful as the sub catalogue pages?
It just seems "the spread of juice" will not be pyramidal.
-
Yikes. 750 links (even if split into sections so you don't see them all at once) on 1 page is not 'human-friendly' (as I know you know). Is that really necessary? I looked at the site and having navigation sub-menus that go 4-deep is kind of a usability issue for people that aren't great with a mouse. Maybe look at ebay's menu structure; they certainly have a large db of products in many categories and don't resort to 100s of links per page just for navigation.
But from and SEO point of view I'm not sure the 750 links are hurting your on-page ranking for a phrase that the page is otherwise optimized for. If you had a page optimized for "widgets" and you did all the correct on-page things for 'widgets' and then had external links pointing to the page with anchor text of 'widgets' then I'm not sure how much you'd be penalized for having 750 links on that page. Given that on-page factors are only about 20% of the ranking equation anyway, I'm not sure it's a huge deal from an SEO/ranking point of view. It's more of a human usability thing, IMO.
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
-
Poor internal linking?
Hi guys, Analyzing a large e-commerce site 10,000 pages on Magento and not getting much organic traffic to level 3 sub-category pages, the URLs are like: Primary Keyword Target: BODY MOISTURISERS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/bath-body/moisturisers.html Primary Keyword Target: LIP MASKS https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/skin-care/masks/lip-masks.html Plus another 40 other URLs at level 3 with low organic performance. Authority of the domain is strong, so it's not an authority issue I believe its internal linking. Besides linking form the blog and breadcrumbs is there anything we can do to improve internal linking to these level 3 pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nattyhall0 -
Site architecture, inner link strategy and duplicate or thin content HELP :)
Ok, can I just say I love that Moz exists! I am still very new to this whole website stuff. I've had a site for about 2 years that I have re-designed several times. It has been published this entire time as I made changes but I am now ready to create amazing content for my niche. Trouble is my target audience is in a very focused niche and my site is really only about 1 topic - life insurance for military families. I'm a military spouse who happens to be an experience life insurance agent offering plans to active duty service members, their spouses as well as veterans and retirees. So really I have 3 niches within a niche. I'm REALLY struggling on how to set up my site architecture. My site is basically fresh so it's a good time to get it hammered down as best as possible with my limited knowledge. Might I also add this is a very competitive space. My competitors are big, established brands who offer life insurance along with unaffiliated, informational sites like military.com or the va benefits site. The people in my niche rarely actually search for life insurance because they think they are all set by the military. When they do search it's very short which is common as this niche lives in a world of acronyms. I'm going to have to get real creative to see if there are any long tail keywords I can use as supporting posts but I think my best route is to attempt to rank for the short one to three keyword phrases this niche looks for while searching. Given my expertise on the subject I am able to write long 1000-5000 content on the matter that will also point out some considerations my competitors dont really cover. My challenge is I cant see how this can be broken into sub topics without having thin supporting content. It's my understanding that I should create these in order to inner link and have a shot at ranking. In thinking about my topic I feel like the supporting posts can only be so long. Furthermore, my three niches within my small overall niche search for short but different keywords. Seems I am struggling to put it all into words. Let me stop here with a question - is it bad to have one category in a website? If not I feel like this would solve my dilemma in making a good site map and content plan. it is possible to split my main topic into 3 categories. I heard somewhere you shouldn't inner link posts from different categories. Problem is if I dont it's not ideal for the user experience as the topics really arent that different. Example a military member might be researching his/her own life insurance and be curious about his spouses coverage. In order to satisfy this user's experience and increase the time on my site I should link to where they can find more dept on their spouses coverage which would be in a different category. Is this still acceptable since it's really not a different subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insuretheheroes.com0 -
Site Architecture: How flat is too flat?
There's a lot of debate out there as far as too many internal links or too many levels of a website. I've seen the videos from Rand and I've read a lot of the posts here on Moz, but I just want to know where everyone stands on this. Anyone have experience with architecture while working on a large E-commerce site? We're talking Millions of pages and over 1,000 links off the homepage alone. Anyways, I don't want to get too specific. I mostly just want to hear about experiences of the community. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
How many back links a day?
I am the owner of a very small business who can not afford a decent SEO company. So I am doing my SEO myself. I am producing good amount of content. But at the same time I am way behind my competition in back linking. Can you please let me know as a rule of thumb, how many external do-follow links a day I should make to be on the safe side? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Subdirectory vs. Subdomain
I work for a large franchise organization that is weighing the pros and cons of using subdomains versus subdirectories for our franchisee locations. What are the pros and cons of each approach?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Glassdoctordfw0 -
What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to build URL links too dilute link profile???
One of my sites has a very spamy link profile, top 20 anchors are money keywords. What are your thoughts on using Dripable, VitaRank, or similar service to help dilute the link profile by building links with URLs, Click Here, more Info, etc. I have been building URL links already, but due to the site age(over 12 years) the amount of exact match anchor text links is just very large and would take forever to get diluted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
Measurement of Link Value
Over the past few months I have encountered webmasters who claim to be using instruments far better than open site explorer but they will not disclose what they are. Are there better ways of determining the value of a link than OSE? Is "link juice" more important than page/domain authority where the link resides? Or vice-vesa. Any help understanding this would be appreciated. I do not want to offend other webmasters but I also do not want to be fooled by them either while negotiating a link exchange with them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Link Juice - Lots of Pages
I have a site, PricesPrices.com where I'm steadily building inbound links and pagerank. I have about 4600 pages on the site, most of which are baby products in the baby gear sector. There are many outdated items that aren't really my focus, but do pop up in long-tail search queries from time to time. My question is a pretty basic one. Theoretically if a site has say 28/100 link juice, then as you go deeper and deeper into the site, the link juice is divided more and more. My question: Is this really true or just a concept? My thoughts are to hide many of the products that i don't really need to focus on therefor passing more link juice to the products that remain, but I also don't want to that if it won't necessarily make the remaining pages rank higher or have more link juice. I also have to keep in mind the merchandising aspect of the site and providing a good user experience. If i only have 300 products on the site, there will be a ton of unhappy people who can't find the products they are looking for. Any thoughts and/or pointers in the direction of funneling that pagerank down into my site would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modparent0