Drop Down Menu - Link Juice Depletion
-
Hi,
We have a site with 7 top level sections all of which contain a large number of subsections which may then contain further sub sections.
To try and ensure the best user experience we have a top navigation with the 7 top level sections and when hovered a selection of the key sub sections.
Although I like this format for the user as it makes it easier for them to find the most important sections / sub sections it does lead to a lot of links within every page on the site. In general each top section has a drop down with approx 10 - 15 subsections.
This has therefore lead to SeoMoz's tools issuing its too many internal links warning. Then alongside this I am left wondering if I shouldn’t have to many links to my subsections and whether I would be better off being more selective of when I link to them. For instance I could choose the top 5 sub sections and place a link to them from our homepage and by doing so I would be passing a greater amount of link juice down the line.
So I guess my dilemma is between ensuring the user has as easy a time traversing the site as possible whilst I try to keep a close watch on where, and how, our link juice is distributed.
One solution I am considering is whether no-follow links could be utilised within the drop down menus? This way I could then have the desired user navigation and I would be in greater control of what pages link to which sub sections. Would that even work?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated,
Regards,
Guy
-
I work for a company that closely mirrors the dropdowns employed by a very large ecommerce site - http://www.surlatable.com/.
Upon analysis of this URL, there are well over 100 links on that page because of the way their dropdowns are designed (over 400 in fact). However, upon close analysis, only 52 of these internal links are followed, and 370 internal links are not followed.
Based on this, I would recommend if you have well in excess of 150 or so links, use nofollow for those less important sub categories like this site has. (I'll have to change the structure of our site now...)
-
Really appreciate the informative reply. Like you I'm currently the SEO for an ecommerce store which has so many variations and sections that it can be a real headache. We've made good progress flattening the sections and I think from what you said, and a Matt Cutts article I just read on the subject, I'll remove the nofollows, leave Google to it, and take things from there.
-
This is an interesting question. It also goes with what to do with a mega menu and all its links. I've wondered whether the SE can understand that this is in fact a navigation (you would think they would) for internal links and not penalize your links in the body of the of the page.
According to Google's John Mueller when discussing about HTML5 he stated the following:
"In general, our crawlers are used to not being able to parse all HTML markup - be it from broken HTML, embedded XML content or from the new HTML5 tags. Our general strategy is to wait to see how content is marked up on the web in practice and to adapt to that ..." http://goo.gl/0YehV
You would then believe from that statement that the SE can differentiate navigation menus and drop down list from links in the body? I mean the SE must have crawled zillions of page and that would be a natural conclusion?
That being said I've use two strategies; the first embedding the select options in javascript... something like this
`**<script type="text/javascript"> /* "); document.write("<option values=" ">Select a Property...<\/option>"); document.write("</option><optgroup label="Beach Estates">");</optgroup>** document.write("<option value="\/alii-estate\/">Alii Estate<\/option>");** ......** **......**</option>` **This seems to work well.... but not sure if it is actually crawled** The other strategy that I am more in favor with is to position the drop down list or navigation with a position:absolute; and then place them physically at the bottom of the page ... this seems a better way, but it can affect the site links. I've not done any real testing on this. Burt Gordon
-
Hi Guy. In terms of no-follow for page rank sculpting purposes, I've read the pros and cons of both and for me I've concluded I'd rather direct the juice where I want it to go rather than to block or prevent it from flowing where I don't want it to flow. No-follow can have unintended results, so I prefer the alternative.
Volume of categories and how to structure them is a challenge for a lot of ecommerce folks (me included). I've recently started flattening my site. While development of useful and intuitive sub-categories helps people find what they want on the 3rd or 4th click, crawl penetration suffers due to the depth. By flattening my site I mean reducing the number of sub-categories that can only be reached by other sub-categories - which is basically moving 3rd or 4th level categories up to the second level or top level (left nav).
A large and top ranking Toy Store I visit often to see how they structure their links has a top nav with categories, a left nav with categories and a sitemap in the footer. Each navigation entry has either different links in it or some different anchor text linking to the same pages. After much reading and apparent consensus among veteran users in this forum, I nixed the sitemap as unnecessary if I use good linking practice throughout the site. One Guru even suggested a sitemap can hurt your rankings if every page is linked to every other page with juice diminishing returns.
In my case, I created a left nav link to additional categories and put categories or sub-categories in them that were either: 1. Removed from the left nav because they were not important enough to be on the left nav 2. Removed from the left nav because on-page analytics suggested they didn't warrant being on the homepage. 3. Were a 3rd or 4th level category that on-page analytics showed there was enough demand to move its link to a second level or top level.
I hope this works for me and could of some help to you. Good luck.
-
Thank you for the link, I had a read and I've also been making the nofollow adjustments I suggested above.
We have tried to break down the menus into simple, managable chunks. Therefore we are really only linking to important categories. That said we can obviously deem some to be more important to us than others. As such i've employed nofollow tags within the menu on the links which won't generate as much ROI.
Is there any problem with having a nofollow to a certain page within our menu, and then a followed link to that same page within the main page content?
-
10-15 dropdown links per tab is a lot to fit on the screen, but in my opinion the "too many links on the page" error is a bit overdone. How many total links appear on your pages on average? Unless you're blowing way past the general rule of thumb of 100 links, you're ok.
E.G. if most of your pages have 100-120 or less then don't worry about it. If most of your pages have upwards of 150+ links then definitely reassess how useful each link is to the user, and consider cutting down.
Here's an in-depth answer by Dr. Pete: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
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
-
Google crawl drop
the crawl request of my company site: https://www.dhgate.com/ has dropped nearly over 95%, from daily 6463599 requests to 476493 requests at 12:00am on 9th, Oct (GMT+8). This dramatic dropping trend not only showed in our GSC crawl stats report but also our company's own log report. We have no idea what’s going on. We want to know whether there is an update of google about crawlling, or is this the issue of our own site? If something is wrong with our site, in what aspects would you recommend us to check, analyze and accordingly optimize?
Technical SEO | | DHgate_20140 -
Webmaster tools not showing links but Moz OSE is showing links. Why can't I see them in the Google Search Console
Hi, Please see attached photos. I have a website that shows external follow links when performing a search on open site explorer. However, they are not recognised or visible in search console. This is the case for both internal and external links. The internal links are 'no follow' which I am getting developer to rectify. Any ideas why I cant see the 'follow' external links? Thanks in advance to those who help me out. Jesse T7dkL5s T7dkL5s OkQmPL4 3qILHqS
Technical SEO | | jessew0 -
Does this count as a link?
Somebody listed me on their site with this link code A Link Between Worlds Walkthrough It does this weird redirect tracking thing to my site. Would that count as a link back to me?
Technical SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Internal followed links only 5
Dear members, As I understand the importancy of Internal Followed Links I want to increase them for www.ruijters.nl. What I do not understand that Open Site Explorer only counts 5 Internal Followed Links. These 5 Internal Followed Links must be the hypelinked images on the homepage? But the website in overall definately has more than 5? Any members who van help me out to fix this problem, so www.ruijters.nl can enjopy his linkjuice? Best Regards, Alain Nijholt
Technical SEO | | bmcinternetmarketing0 -
Specific Link Page in Domain
Hi everyone: I have seen that many SEO Agencies have contacted my business (Also SEO but In- House) in order to interchange links. They have created a specific page on their site with the Label "Links" or similar, and on that page they add multiple links of the competence. I have heard that you can only do that if you make sure you add two things: No follow in links. Not inserting links of websites that have nothing to do with our sector. Either way, I have never found this amusing. I always recommend people not to do this but I have my doubts after all. ¿Could some one give me their opinion? Cheers !
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
How not to lose link juice when linking to thousands of PDF guides?
Hi All, I run an e-commerce website with thousands of products.
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet
In each product page I have a link to a PDF guide of that product. Currently we link to it with a "nofollow" <a href="">tag.</a> <a href="">Should we change it to window.open in order not to lose link juice? Thanks</a>0 -
4XX Broken Links
I am attempting to fix the issues SEOmoz found when crawling my site. I have a list of 4XX errors that I am attempting to fix. Basically I know one option is to redirect them to another page, but I would like to have the option to remove the links completely. The only problem is I can not find where the links are located. Does SEOmoz provide where on my site these broken links are? Or do they only provide the url that is linked to?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Effect of rel canonical on links
Has anyone done any experimentation on how Google treats links that are on a page that is being "rel canonical'd" to another page? For eg, example.com/b has a canonical pointing to example.com/a How does Google treat the internal links that are on page example.com/b?
Technical SEO | | Burgo0