Unsure about main menu structure on a big magazine site
-
We've got a well-established Wordpress magazine-type site with over 3000 posts and quite a lot of categories (100) and tags (117). These categories are needed as we write about quite a diverse subject, but I've been having a look at our current menu setup (megaMenu type affair with a lot of links) and I was wondering whether it's worth moving to a simpler/more streamlined main navigation and showing the sub menu items in a different way. The reason I say this is most cats/tags are used in the main menu which is a lot, and that's before any on page links are taken into consideration.
I've also been looking at the analytics and seeing what the most popular cats/tags are - Do we want to concentrate on those only, or from a usability perspective should we give users as many options to find what they may be looking for instead?
Would appreciate some help to get my head round this
-
The main menu structure is where it would be important. Does your layout now have a menu with 100 links?
If your hundred categories can be sorted into five or ten more general categories with other categories under those, it would make navigation easier.
You can still keep all of your categories as first level under the domain in the URL, even if they are drop-downs (or however you want to do it) under an over-category.
If the point is to get away from so many links in the header, even if they are not immediately visible, then the question is how important are all the categories. Can some be consolidated?
-
Hi Linda, yes we do have a lot
Do you mean in the main menu structure or the actual categories/tags structure in wordpress that has parent and child categories?
Thanks,
James
-
It sounds like you have quite a lot of categories! Can any of the categories become the main categories and other categories sub-categories beneath them?
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
-
Unlinked mentions that seem to be FROM by site
Hi Everyone I'm new to SEO so apologies if this is a silly question. I'm using the unlinked mentions tool and as far as I can see the mentions are from my own site! I've attached a screen grab. Am I being a muppet? I thought that it would show mentions on OTHER sites that I don't have a link back to my site! The screen grab appears to show links on my site, as in posts on my own forum? Thanks for your help! Cw2bjhw
Link Building | | NappyValleyNet0 -
Links between own sites cause bad pagerank?
Many people say PR does not matter, but for me its an indicator that links from a domain with higher PR may rank better. My client has a about 4 different travel-sites of very different kinds of travelling. His sites are not ranking bad but all sites have just a PR 0-2 although the content is unique. I made the experience that even sites with few content will have at least a PR of 3 after some years with no SEO effort. One reason is may some part of duplicate content (4 Tours begin in Manaus, so the description for Manaus is on all the 4 Tour pages the same) but another is that the pages have few external links but many of other sites he is owning... like: also check out this -> link to another own site. Question: If I take all these links away (they even don't cause many referrals at all) - will this have a positive effect on rankings? Means trying to have always more external links from not self owned sites is a good start? Thanks for sharing your experiences Holger
Link Building | | inlinear0 -
Backlinks that redirect to your site
Hi all, I just wanted to ask you all about backlinks that redirect to your site. I recently used Link Detox Tools to carry out a link analysis. However, some of our backlinks are redirecting to our homepage. Is this ok? Why is this happening? Thanks guys!!!
Link Building | | AAttias0 -
Are sites that "smell of SEO" being demoted?
I'm working with a site owner who recently hired an SEO to work on just one particular type of keyword. It seems like the more work the SEO did, the lower the keyword gradually dropped. Granted, the "work" is pretty low quality - anchor texted bookmarks, comments and low quality articles. We're doing an experiment where we are going to disavow those links and see if the previous rankings return. Another site that I am consulting with has a lot of good natural links and then some anchor texted links, but from decent sources - some guest posts (on good sites - not a spammy site that exists only for guest posts) and some places where decent websites have agreed to link to the site. The anchor texted links do not make up very much of the overall anchor text. There is good diversity and lots of brand and url anchored links. It seems like the more the SEO does for this site, the more the rankings drop. And it's not all about anchor text. The SEO placed a link in a relevant directory, using the url as anchor...rankings dropped a little. They obtained an expired domain with relevant and very natural links and 301'd it to the new domain...rankings dropped several places. And so on. Occasionally the rankings will pop up a little, but overall it's a downward spiral. Check out this post by Gary Taylor. He did an experiment where he took an established site that was ranking well and threw some spammy links at it. To quote the article, 'every day goes by my ranking for the term “domains” is getting harder to maintain.' He recently tweeted that he has been removing and disavowing links and the rankings are returning. I was looking at searches for real estate related terms in different cities. In some cities, the top sites are ones that have ZERO obvious SEO done to them. There are sites ranking on page 3 that have been SEO'd, and not all of them have poor SEO. Many are what I would consider really well done. Some of the sites ranking on page 1 have under 10 links. There was one with 2 followed links and they were not from super authoritative sites! To complicate matters though, if you look at searches like "Toronto Real Estate Agents" some of the top sites have lots of keyword anchor texted links. Perhaps this should be a blog post rather than a Q&A, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts. My personal thought is that Google's main goal with Penguin and the unnatural links warnings is to make it so that not only is it not profitable to try to manipulate the SERPS, but that every time you try to do so, you potentially do your rankings harm. I used to say that Penguin could only affect a site on the date of a Penguin refresh, but I am thinking now that Google has managed to roll Penguin into the algorithm to some extent so that it can demote the majority of any work that smells of SEO. Thoughts?
Link Building | | MarieHaynes0 -
Networking sites / paid links
A national networking company charges its members, say, a few of hundred pounds to become part of their network, which involves offline networking events and online in forums and a directory. All the links of the directory and forum sigs etc are all do-follow. While it's not just a directory, how beneficial a link is this likely to be? The site itself has a DA of 60 and a PR rank of 4. 1k likes on their cnnected FB page and 21 likes on the G+. At the networking meetings they tell new recruits that being a member gives them a very valuable backlink and everytime they participate in the forums they get another do follow backlink. Ive checked and they are dofollow. Is this likely to be a great value link?
Link Building | | littlesthobo0 -
301 redirect blog network to main site, good or bad?
Hi, Here is a newbie question. When we launched our web shop 18 months ago I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop. Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well. Can I do 301 redirects of the blogs/posts to the web shop to rank higher in the SERP for the keywords? If I do, what happens to the links from the blogs to the shop? Will the shop loose a lot of links, but gain in PA, DA, mR etc? Overall, would the shop/main site benefit from this? Or should I just leave the blogs and not mess with them? They don't have much traffic. I appreciate any input, thanks!
Link Building | | DanielSndstrm0 -
Linking to Adsense heavy sites?
Hi SEOmoz community! Hopefully a pretty straight forward question here... Does anyone know if linking to "Adsense heavy" websites can have a negative impact on your rankings? Or a positive impact even? Thes sites in particular are owned by a business aquintance, so they come from a trusted source even though the sites themselves look quite "spammy". Also they all have pagerank of 1 or 2 and there's about 100 of the sites that we would link to. Does anyone have any thoughts? Regards, Ash 🙂
Link Building | | AshSEO20110 -
Is it a bad idea to build unique sites to build credibility for your main site?
It is hard to sum up the question in one line, but basically my company has bought several descriptive domains that we would like to build out into microsites that link back to our main site. For example...say we are a florist. Our main site talks about all the different kinds of flowers we have and the work we do. So the idea is to buy weddingflowersdallas.com (example only...) and have a mini site that has the same look and feel as our main site, but has unique content that talks solely about our wedding flower business and has a few links back to our main site. 1. Is this a no no from a google perspective? 2. Is this a good strategy in general? Thanks, David
Link Building | | ciinc1