Is a Mega Menu with over 300 links in it hurting my rankings?

[sparrowdog]

I got hit pretty badly by Panda 4.0 (1/3 of my traffic lost), and I'm fairly certain it was because Google had potentially indexed over 20 million pages from a site filtering piece of software and got done for duplicate content. I have since fixed that using URL Parameters and that 20 million is down to 2.7 million now and I have submitted a clean site map, so now I wait.

I have just done a site relaunch and am trying to determine if there are any other issues. I run an online store, and I have a mega menu with well over 300 links in it - makes the user experience really quick and easy to jump exactly where you want - and then I have about 30 links in the footer.

I know there's a 'no more than 100 links on a page' guideline for Moz, but does anyone know if Google is smart enough to see the same header / footer navigation structure on every page of a site and know it's navigation and not water down the rest of the links, or do I need to re-think and simplify my navigation?

It's one of those things that's there for a user experience and now I'm worried that I'm being penalised.

The site is www dot shopnaturally dot com dot au

[sparrowdog]

Much appreciated. Thank you.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Joanne,

Sorry for not totally expanding on what I meant as the outcome using javascript! Yes, you're "hiding" portions of the mega menu. There is speculation that search engines might execute JS commands to find out if there is content behind them, but at the moment this still seems a valid way to "remove" links from Google's total link count. Keep and eye on whether this changes though (and acknowledge that it might not be totally reliable, even now).

Perhaps check out this tutorial for JS menus: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/menu/javascript.htm

Cheers,

Jane

[sparrowdog]

HI Jane, further to the comment about M&S and Debenhams, I now understand what you mean by using a JS-powered navigation. While we can see it as users, the search engines can't see the endless links in the mega menu.

While having a phone consult with an SEO person today, he mentioned the same thing, using AJAX to hide that kind of information from Google so the users still get the experience of the content but Google isn't reading endless pieces of information it doesn't need.

I am a web developer, but not a high level programmer. Could you point me in the direction of where I should look as far as tutorials go so I can implement this in my site?

The links in the mega menu that I'll want to hide with AJAX are all readily available on main category pages and in breadcrumbs.

[JaneCopland]

Yep, I would guess that your Panda issue was far more likely to have been the URLs than the menu - that's pretty standard Panda fare so that's great that you've sorted that out.

I am leaning towards really doubting that the menu is hurting you at all, but of course experimenting with removing non-essential menu items is possible. It's hard to draw real conclusions from the results you see after you modify something like a menu because other factors will influence rankings during that time, e.g. you gain or lose links, Google changes its treatment of unrelated metrics, your competitors gain or lose links, etc.

[sparrowdog]

Thanks again. I've just noticed our rankings climb for a few phrases & keywords purely by doing internal keyword linking and writing quality blog posts.  I'm sitting on the fence as to whether to ditch my mega menu or at least greatly simplify it. It provides ease of use for the end user to jump straight to the category they want, but if I'm losing traffic, then they're not on the site to use it.

Catch 22.

I've been watching a pile of Matt Cutts videos but haven't found one on this particular topic yet. I'm pretty sure my Panda issue was cough 20 million pages listed in URL Parameters from a poorly set up internal refine search feature that's been given the flick. We're down to 2.6 mil now and some of my rankings are slightly improving already.

[JaneCopland]

I'm assuming these internal keyword links are a lot more effective if they're only competing against 100 links instead of 400+

In theory, kind of - one link out of 100 that uses the anchor text "natural skin care" will receive a higher percentage of the available passable PageRank than one link out of 400 using the same anchor text. The link from a page with just 99 other links should not be seen as any more relevant for the phrase "natural skin care" than the link from the 400-link page though. But it should receive more of a boost for that keyphrase than if it had to share the passable authority with three times the number of targets.

I am making an assumption here, so if anyone else knows that relevancy in internal anchor text goes up along with the division of passable PageRank, please chime in!

Google doesn't have the same reverence for anchor text that it had a few years ago, but most of its efforts in not relying so much on anchor text have been focused on inbound links from other websites, rather than internal links.

[sparrowdog]

Fabulous answer Jane. Thank you so much

I think the thing I'm concerned about now is how well my internal keyword linking is going to work with 300+ links on each page. We're going to the trouble of rewriting a lot of content and doing some very specific internal keyword linking to help people move around the shop better and also for SEO purposes.

I'm assuming these internal keyword links are a lot more effective if they're only competing against 100 links instead of 400+ ?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Joanne,

The "fewer than 100 links" quote is a little bit outdated in terms of what Google can actually handle. This article from late last year makes clear that the limit is long gone. The guideline is an okay benchmark when it comes to ensuring that you aren't overloading a page with useless or irrelevant content and links, but it's definitely not a requirement for crawling / indexing / ranking success anymore.

Your drop-down looks pretty standard to me. Some sites choose to present menus like this using JavaScript to call lower-level URLs (e.g. Hair, Face & Body + Natural Skin Care might be links in the HTML but then a JS call is required to bring up Certified Organic Skin Care, Cleansers, etc. - Google and other search engines do not traditionally execute JavaScript and thus won't see the links) but this is an increasingly unnecessary tactic, and could be detrimental if those URLs are not linked to in a crawlable manner elsewhere within the website.

Having a lot of links on a page has one "detriment" - a page does not "leak" PageRank / authority if it links out a lot, but it does mean that less PageRank passes through each link if there are hundreds of links, as opposed to 50 or 100 links. The total amount of PR that can be passed on is divided amongst more links. Again, it's important that links to all your pages be crawled so that those pages are indexed and receive authority, so I don't think you have to worry about this.

Further example: http://www.marksandspencer.com/ uses a JS-powered navigation, http://www.debenhams.com/ does not.

[DJ123]

Nice website.

I would spend much more time getting quality, pertinent backlinks for your site from creating good content pieces which people want to share/link to.

Do you use canonical urls throughout the site?