"Too Many On-Page Links" Issue
-
I'm being docked for too many on page links on every page on the site, and I believe it is because the drop down nav has about 130 links in it. It's because we have a few levels of dropdowns, so you can get to any page from the main page. The site is here - http://www.ibethel.org/
Is what I'm doing just a bad practice and the dropdowns shouldn't give as much information? Or is there something different I should do with the links? Maybe a no-follow on the last tier of dropdown?
-
Marcus and Alan offered some very good advice.
I've visited your website before and had a good user experience.
I'd only add two suggestions.
The Itineraries Tab could be a one-click to the Itineraries landing page. It is easy to locate individual names in the Left Nav and main events/conferences on the page.
Get Google Page Speed for Firefox. Love the wealth of information and fixes it offers. I like to copy and paste the page results into Notepad. You can see scores for each issue--helps prioritize what to fix first.
HTH
-
Some great stuff there - thumbs up!
-
While having all those links in the main nav site-wide isn't necessarily helpful to SEO, I routinely deal with clients that have twice as many links in their drop-downs. So I agree with Marcus - it shouldn't be causing you serious problems.
In addition to Marcus' suggestion, I would recommend a couple things to work on:
1. Sub-navigation
Like you have in the Staff section http://www.ibethel.org/staff - by adding in sub-navigation (links within that section that appear on each page of that section, and only for those pages) you reinforce content relationships.
2. Referrer Code in URLs - Duplicate Content
You've got links that have their URL appended to track referrer source right on the site. On the home page - the graphic call-out box (large graphic with 3 smaller graphics to the right of it). These links point to internal pages but stick
"?referrer=front_page" on the end. And since your graphics rotate, that means every page linked from this area is generating its own duplicate content conflict. While some programmers say it's fine, it's not. You could mitigate this by pushing canonical tags across the entire site, however best practices dictate to eliminate this referrer tracking method completely - Google only uses canonical tags as a signal and not all search engines use it.
3. Site Speed
I ran a couple site speed tests - you've got some serious issues regarding crawl speed. Your home page images are huge files, and you take a second hit with lots of Javascript file loading times. - More than one check came in at over 13 seconds - that's not user speed - it's crawlability by search bots. I highly recommend looking further into that. If it takes search bots too long to crawl just one single page, some of the links on that page will not be found during any single crawl - and this alone could be part of your problem. Look to have those graphic images compressed without losing quality. Look to have your Javascript files compiled.
4. Store Issues
Your category pages (http://store.ibethel.org/Childrens-Resources/c236/index.html for example) have no paragraph based descriptions so you're missing out on an important way to properly optimize those category pages for SEO.
5. Content Organization
Also in the store - your Books section organization is a bit messed up. So your breadcrumbs are broken. For example on this sub-category page http://store.ibethel.org/Books-Books/c173_25/index.html the breadcrumb shows Store Home > Catalog > Books > Books when it should be Store Home > Books. Except when I go to the top level "Books" link in the breadcrumbs I get an empty page http://store.ibethel.org/Books/c173/index.html
6. Store Page Titles
In the store, when there's more than one page of products in a category, if I click down to the 2nd or 3rd page in that category, I get the same page Title. Every page title should be unique, so the simplest way to fix that is to append page titles with the page number. Like Music then Music | Page 2 then Music | Page 3 and so on.
7. Stronger Titles
Your page titles in the store could be much stronger - Having a page TItle of "Music" isn't going to allow your site to rank extremely well given how competitive that single word is. You'd be better off with titles like:
Christian Music | Online Christian Music Downloads
Or for "Childrens Resources" a better page Title might be:
Christian Parenting | Christian Education Reources
8. Store Home Page Duplicate
Both http://store.ibethel.org/index.html and http://store.ibethel.org/ work - so that's duplicate content - have the index.html version set up with a 301 redirect pointing to the http://store.ibethel.org version.
-
Hey Blairr
Can you explain the problem a little more as I can't really see anything wrong with the site.
In your case, the 130 nav links is not the end of the world as you don't have a massive site (category, sub category, product etc). Also, I have done various searches for your title tag and the name of your church and you have great visibility in those results with a 1st place homepage listing, a google map listing, site links and various other pages so nothing to worry about there.
I also did a search for a snippet of text from one of your deep testimonial pages "but I trust it will be encouraging to all. In March" - what was interesting was that it returned three pages, two of which were from another site called healingherald.org.
So, you may find that these pages are not going to rank so well as this content already exists on another site which is ranking above you for the content.
If you have ranking issues, I would investigate these first and depending on who owns the content either remove these dupe pages from the index or investigate using a canonical URL to the other site (or from the other site to you if it is your content).
Certainly, that is where I would start rather than the navigation as whilst there is a general 100 links a page rule, I would not obsess about that in the overall hierarchy of this site.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
Disavow links old links
We have built a lot of sites and there a few sites we no longer manage or want any association with. When I have looked at webmasters I can see 20 to 200+ odd links back to our site. The page however at source has no reference to our website. I have searched the code but there isn't anything. Is it safe to disavow these or just leave them?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Car Dealership website - Duplicate Page Content Issues
Hi, I am currently working on a large car dealership website. I have just had a Moz crawl through and its flagging a lot of duplicate page content issues, these are mostly for used car pages. How can I get round this as the site stocks many of the same car, model, colour, age, millage etc. Only unique thing about them is the reg plate. How do I get past this duplicate issue if all the info is relatively the same? Anyone experienced this issue when working on a car dealership website? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | karl621 -
Will a blog post about a collection of useful tools and web resources for a specific niche being seen as negative by google for too many links?
SEO newbie here, I'm thinking about creating a blog post about a collection of useful tools and web resources for my specific niche. It'd be 300 links or more, but with comments, and categorized nicely. It'd be a useful resource for my target audience to bookmark, and share. Will google see this as a negative? If so, what's the best way to do such a blog post? Thanks
Technical SEO | | ericzou0 -
How long does it take for Moz to discover links to pages
Hi folks, Our website is doing well in the Google rankings relative to our competitors who often have higher "Domain authority" than us as reported by Moz. I'm wondering how closely Moz's "Domain Authority" correlates with Google's. In particular, I wonder how long it takes Moz to discover inbound links. For instance our page at http://www.educationquizzes.com/ks3/english has many inbound links from pages on an outstanding educational website and yet our page authority is given by Moz as a measly "1"! Any insights would be very much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | colinking0 -
Responsive design blowing out on page links?
Hi guys, We have a site about to launch with a responsive design to suit desktop, tablet and mobile. Each design carries it's own navigation as one primary set of navigational links won't suit all versions of the design. So as desktop resizes to mobile (or tablet) the desktop navigation is hidden (css) and replaced by the nav more suited to the mobile experience (hope I've explained that ok!). Problem is that if the primary navigation carries 50 links then all 3 designs together carry 150 links which is too many on page links. Is that going to be a problem? Is there a tag that can be applied to the mobile/tablet nav links? Like a canonical tag but for links?? Cheers in advance of your ideas
Technical SEO | | lovealbatross
James0 -
Implementation of rel="next" & rel="prev"
Hi All, I'm looking to implement rel="next" & rel="prev", so I've been looking for examples. I looked at the source code for the MOZ.com forum, if anyone one is going to do it properly MOZ are. I noticed that the rel="next" & rel="prev" tags have been implemented in the a href tags that link to the previous and next pages rather than in the head. I'm assuming this is fine with Google but in their documentation they state to put the tags in the . Does it matter? Neil.
Technical SEO | | NDAY0 -
Too many external links?
Ok, so I am finally focusing more on SEO of my hobby website as I am notice the relavent keywords are not really onsite what I want, for example, according to analytics "post" is my most popular keyword which I assume is from the vbulletin forum. My question today is that according to the moz scan, my forum has too many external links, my question is what are some measures I can do whether within the vbulletin forum or custom coding to reduce the amount of links/increase power? www.rcnightmare.com
Technical SEO | | TheTippingPoint0 -
Duplicate Page Issue
Dear All, I am facing stupid duplicate page issue, My whole site is in dynamic script and all the URLs were in dynamic, So i 've asked my programmer make the URLs user friendly using URL Rewrite, but he converted aspx pages to htm. And the whole mess begun. Now we have 3 different URLs for single page. Such as: http://www.site.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=Multi-Day+City+Tours http://www.tsite.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=multi-day-city-tours http://www.site.com/city-tour/multi-day-city-tours/page4-0.htm I think my programmer messed up the URL Rewrite in ASP.net(Nginx) or even didn't use it. So how do i overcome this problem? Should i add canonical tag in both dynamic URLs with pointing to pag4-0.htm. Will it help? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0