Structuring navigation for maximum effect
-
Hi,
I am working with a client (in the property niche) who has 200+ links on each page of their site mainly due to an extensive navigation menu. They have good domain authority (although some competitors have a lot better) and some excellent links from some fantastic domains but the keywords just aren’t moving. (Sidenote: most links point to the home page with some going to property detail pages not location pages which is where I’d like people to be landing).
I am reviewing the site structure and other technical aspects and have some questions regarding how the navigation is structured.
Firstly is 200+ links an ok number to have? Everything I read points to 100 being a magic number to aim for.
Secondly, the site navigation menu contains a list of locations. The first tier being country, the second tier drops down to list the regions within that country, then a third tier drop down appears to list the towns and cities in those regions. So from any page in the site you can drill down to town/city locations. (Sidenote: I have run Hotjar on the site which shows most people are using the search facility not the navigation menu to search)
Is this style of navigation ok or does it dilute the link authority/pagerank/juice being past to each page?
Would a better option be to have the first and second tier in the drop down then the third level town navigation to appear in the sidebar at page level in the appropriate sections? What effect would such a change have on rankings?
-
Hi Peter,
The conclusion I have come to is to try to keep page links to around 100 but that said there is a lot of conflicting info out there which is where the confusion comes in. I have read that 100-200 is ok now a days but essentially the more links you have the more the page authority will be diluted so it makes sense to keep links down.
On this topic Moz’s on page grader tool says
“Google has confirmed that the use of too many internal links on a page will not trigger a penalty, but it can influence the quantity of link juice sent through those links and dilute your page's ability to have search engines crawl, index, and rank link targets.
Recommendation: Scale down the number of internal links on your page to fewer than 100, if possible. At a minimum, try to keep navigation and menu links to fewer than 100. See http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many.”
In my situation there are some unnecessary and duplicated links so I looking at ways in which these can be reduced. My hope is that the page authority will then be channeled to the more important areas of the site.
Regarding location of the links, those in the navigation will probably carry more weight than those in the footer so I would try to include your most important links in the top part of the page. If you look at Moz’s home page for example the footer links are pointing to pages like Contact us, research tools, parents, api and Terms rather than duplicating the main navigation again.
That is my take on the situation anyway.
Hope this helps,
Andy -
Hi Andy,
I have a similar situation with my site so I am interested in what is advised here as I've also thought maybe page sculpting is the answer but I've heard different answers on this subject. In my case , the 100 link rule wont work
From what I've read and heard in google hangouts etc
- 100 Links per page is out of date now as google can and does read more links than this.
- The types of links and where they are on the page does affect its importance. I.e Navigation and footer links are treated differently
- Do you have duplication in the links ? i.e anything that appears both in the footer and the nav or someone else on the page?
I remember John Mueller (Google) recently advised against Page Sculpting as it could more harm than good.
Please share what you find out as this is an interesting topic which will benefit many on there
thanks
Pete
-
Thanks for the advice Josh. Will PM you
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
-
Best practice for URL structure - short and sweet, or double keyword?
We are just about to re-jig our main category pages and have found that different leading sites have taking different views on short and sweet url structure vs. repeated keywords1. For our website we have two options. We have two options: mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants-in-birmingham or mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants Someone like opentable have gone for short and sweet (opentable.co.uk/birmingham-restaurants) whereas people like Time Out have gone longer with multiple matches in the url (timeout.com/london/food-drink/londons-top-50-restaurants). Is there a consensus on which is better?
On-Page Optimization | | HireSpace0 -
I want to improve our client's website structure, so he gets more traffic locally. What advice do you have ?
We want to "revamp" our client's website, by improving the overall looking (content, images, structure). Our client is a small retail business but wants to have more traffic. What advice can you give me ?
On-Page Optimization | | marketingmedia.ca0 -
Navigation causing too many links
If I add pages to my site to cover major cities/towns/counties in the UK where I offer wedding bands and link them from the navigation using drop down menus/categories ( I believe this is the best option to allow users to find what they are looking for) I get a'too many links on page' flag. How can I best get around this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
What does this mean on first step up setting up a campaign? "Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here."
I am BRAND new to this, and setting up my first campaign. I choose subdomain, and entered www.pdsaz.com. This is the message I receive: We have detected that the domain www.pdsaz.com and the domain pdsaz.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here.
On-Page Optimization | | cschwartzel0 -
Importance of URL Structure
We are trying to restructure our onpage SEO and want to make sure we have our URLs correct. The problem is we did the URLs incorrectly in the first place and the ones we currently have are several years olds. We have some URLs such as: http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/courses/management/prince2.asp and
On-Page Optimization | | RobertChapman
http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/courses/cisco/ccna_2007.asp which are not ideal but user experience aside does it make sense for us to change the URLs and use 301 redirects to the new ones or is the damage done to our natural rankings simply not worth making the change? I have read different articles saying different things, some say that URL structure has little weight (if any weight at all) on rankings while other people seem to say it is quite important. In addition we have heard that changing the URLs with a 301 redirect will cause a large drop in ranking which will take months to recover from and contrarily that 301s are now considered "ok" by Google and we shouldn't see too much change at all in our rankings. Any advice would be much appreciated.0 -
Site Structure
I'm confused about the best way for seo to set up the site structure . i understand the examples of the pyramid diagrams and how link juice flows, however does this mean that global navigation is not good? It appears the pyramid structure leads to the designated number of category pages (we'll use five) and they lead to the 5 content pages etc and some "superman pages" can be linked to from the home page but is this is global navigation or anchor text navigation and is gloval navigation acdeptable for content pages? Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | JulB0 -
Some of my pages are ranking for terms which I want other pages to rank for. What can I do to effectively switch the ranking?
Some of the pages are ranking for terms I have optimised other pages for. The pages which are ranking are quite rightly falling, because they aren't optimised for the terms they're showing for. However, I have pages which are optomised for those terms. How do I switch the SERPS to the page I want?
On-Page Optimization | | GlobalLingo1 -
Any SEO effect(s) / impact of Meta No Cache?
Hi SEOMoz Guys, Hope you guys are doing well. I've been searching online and bumped into this archived page (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/34982/meta-nocache-affect-ranking). I would like to get an updated take on this issue whether or not the meta no cache code on a page bears negative/positive or no SEO impact / effect. <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache"/> Thanks! Steve
On-Page Optimization | | sjcbayona-412182