How to Have Flat Navigation w/out Diluting Link Juice
-
I have a client with a very flat navigational structure relying on a menu with CSS hover dropdowns using simple
-
items to get to just about every page on the site through the main navigation on every page. They want this ability to remain. The issue is stat is send link juice all over and does not concentrate into pages that are key search landing pages. I don't want to "no Index" "follow" the less important pages since there are some brand related long tail searches that I would want these pages found. These are useful pages to consumers who are already engaged with the brand, but not ones we would not care to rank for outside of branded search.
If there was a way to have some links be non-crawled via javascript (or some other method) and those that are more important use a more standard html type link that would seem ideal.
Does anyone have a suggestion for menu tool or technique for exposing to consumers all the links to consumers but restricting google bot's path while being in line with Google Webmaster guideslines?
Blair
-
-
Doug,
Somehow I missed your response. The site has 200 pages or so linked from the navigation. Thanks for the suggestion. Adding some links or breadcrumbs may help.
Ideally what I would want to do is have google crawl to the important pages and not have juice flow to customer service / info only pages that in most cases have little need to rank in the SERP's.
The client wants flat navigation, and I understand the point (you can be anywhere and find these pages). The drawback is spraying juice to non-relevant pages from a SEO perspective. If there is a way to block crawling that is not considered cloaking, that would be the approach.
Thanks for answering.
-
How many pages are we talking about here? How big is the site and how many pages as in the main navigation?
If you assume that every page is linking to every other page via the main navigation than why not add additional, in-context on-page links with relevant anchor text. This will help search engines determine the relative importance of your pages and maybe provide some additional relevancy signals too.
If all your pages have additional links back to a particular landing page then you'll raise the authority of that page.
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
-
Location Links in Footer
Our business is in 10 cities. We offer identical services in each city, there's absolutely nothing different about the services we offer based on location. We have a contact page for each city with a bit of unique content (phone, address, photo of city, list of counties we service). It really would be a grey area to create subsites for each city and try to rewrite the service description content 10 times. However, we want to improve organic results. We of course have Google Places listings for each city. From an on-page SEO perspective, wouldn't it only have the possibility of benefiting, not hurting local SEO but add the city name linked to that city's contact page in the footer? I've seen arguments against it, and could see maybe if you were in like 50 cities instead of 10, but is there really any observed downside to doing that in the footer for every page? We can't title the difference service pages with the city name in the headings or page title, so at least we'd have anchor text in the footer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9640 -
Internal Linking
Hi I've been looking over my pages and it says for this page for example http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/1-6kw-halogen-heater I have too many links, I think it was about 178. These links are from the menu and bottom of the page - how much of an issue is this for internal linking structure? I wouldn't want to remove the menus or change them too much. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Can Google read content/see links on subscription sites?
If an article is published on The Times (for example), can Google by-pass the subscription sign-in to read the content and index the links in the article? Example: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/property/overseas/article4245346.ece In the above article there is a link to the resort's website but you can't see this unless you subscribe. I checked the source code of the page with the subscription prompt present and the link isn't there. Is there a way that these sites deal with search engines differently to other user agents to allow the content to be crawled and indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
I got message in my Google webmaster tool: Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Does anyone knows the difference between "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links" and "Unnatural links to your site" Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
I do a lot of on page SEO... I was wondering some basic tactics / strategies for link building? Please provide only WHITE HAT suggestions! Thank You ;)
Please keep in mind google's announcement on links recently.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | entourage2120 -
Can I reduce number of on page links by just adding "no follow" tags to duplicate links
Our site works on templates and we essentially have a link pointing to the same place 3 times on most pages. The links are images not text. We are over 100 links on our on page attributes, and ranking fairly well for key SERPS our core pages are optimized for. I am thinking I should engage in some on-page link juice sculpting and add some "no follow" tags to 2 of the 3 repeated links. Although that being said the Moz's on page optimizer is not saying I have link cannibalization. Any thoughts guys? Hope this scenario makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Redirects/Forwarding
I have two niche e-commerce sites. One is a PR3 with 3K pages indexed, the other is PR0 with 5K pages indexed. Each site has a blog that has been updated regularly. They both rank well for some fairly competitive keywords and some good links pointing to them. I also have a main site that is PR3. I am thinking of closing down the sites because they are not generating enough revenue, here are my questions: What is the best way to get the most SEO value from these sites? Do I just do a redirect to the main site? Should I keep the sites and use canonical URLs to the main site? Should I keep the domain as a wordpress blog and point links to the main site? What should I do with the blogs? They are on sub-domains, neither has pagerank. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0