Tricky: Should I remove this extra navigation?
-
Hello there,
I am working on a website in which the owner has written navigation links manually at the end of all pages/posts.
Example.
Page/Post Entry content.
Go to home click here,
Menu item 2
Menu item 3
Menu item 4 etcWe already have navigation links for that on the main menu and additionally on a sidebar.
But we are two years in, and they have always been there.
Is there a chance removing all these links will better internal pagerank distribution?
Website has millions of views/month so I want to be sure - if I should just leave them as is or remove them all.
Or what extra questions should I be asking myself about this. -
Thanks James, I really appreciate your thoughts. Would love to get confirmation from anyone else willing to chime in.
-
Hi everyone, would appreciate any further comments, thanks in advance.
-
Hi James,
We're trying to increase traffic even more! This in my eyes can have an effect even at a Domain authority level.
Thanks for the words. -
Hi Ricky,
Thanks for your input, we are talking 8 links across 200 pages, that's 1600 internal inks. That's a lot of internal links which are in theory diluting pagerank of every page.
The paradox seems to be that if they are diluting said pagerank to the main pages of the site then I suppose it cancels itself out?
I don't mind doing these changes if we have a solid argument for or against...
-
Hi there,
I'm not totally sure that anyone can definitively answer that question (I could be wrong), but my thought would be that those types of links, if listed on every page would probably be ignored and any real ranking impact would be extremely minimal. I can't imagine this being very important one way or the other.
If you're nervous about removing, you could always experiment a bit at a time and monitor impacts, but I wouldn't be quick to attribute results one way or the other to such a minor issue (or non-issue).
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
-
Navigation Menu - Whats too much
Ive always had pages set up for a lot of our products and had these in the navigation menu. For instance we sell Solar Control Window Film which helps with heat, glare and UV. We then have a navigation menu something like this: Solar Window Film
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fozzy1609
Heat Control window Films
Anti glare window film
UV window film
etc etc Ihave this for all my services and products. I have unique content on each. My question is this. Would I be better having the naviation menu with links to all the seperate services we offer
OR
Should I have it linking to the main services and then the related services from within the page> For example Ill have just Solar Window Film in the navigation and then on the page it would internally link to the heat related section and the glare related section etc. Im wondering whether my sub pages would suffer because theyre not linked to from every page with the second method or whether it would help in some way0 -
How to switch from URL based navigation to Ajax, 1000's of URLs gone
Hi everyone, We have thousands of urls generated by numerous products filters on our ecommerce site, eg./category1/category11/brand/color-red/size-xl+xxl/price-cheap/in-stock/. We are thinking of moving these filters to ajax in order to offer a better user experience and get rid of these useless urls. In your opinion, what is the best way to deal with this huge move ? leave the existing URLs respond as before : as they will disappear from our sitemap (they won't be linked anymore), I imagine robots will someday consider them as obsolete ? redirect permanent (301) to the closest existing url mark them as gone (4xx) I'd vote for option 2. Bots will suddenly see thousands of 301, but this is reflecting what is really happening, right ? Do you think this could result in some penalty ? Thank you very much for your help. Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeremyICC0 -
Doing a re-design but worried about my new navigation affecting rankings
Hi, I'm a little worried/interested in the affects of my new navigation on ranking. So here is the current site - followuk.co.uk/mothers-day I have chosen an internal page because 99% of my traffic goes to these and generally external links and social shares happen on these pages (naturally because of the nature of the content). As you can see I have a nav bar on the left which links to all other pages. In my new design I will get rid of this nav bar altogether and have a breadcrumb which will give the user the option to root back to a category page which will contain these links instead. Kind of like this: Home > Important Dates > Mothers Day (if your on the mothers day page) I'm in two minds because maybe pages are passing PageRank helping each other to rank, but on the other side maybe the strong pages which do rank well and gain links/social shares are not ranking as well because they are passing link juice through the navigation to other pages. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | followuk0 -
Penguin 2.1\. Bad links removed - do I need to wait for next Penguin upgrade to see recovery?
Hi - I have read conflicting advice about this issue - after taking action and removing bad links following a Penguin 2.1 hit, will the site need to wait for the next Penguin upgrade before the link clean-up has any effect? Or will the cleaning of the links be acknowledged and "rewarded" with a ranking improvement before that (assuming all bad links were cleared out)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevieD0 -
Best practice for removing pages
I've got some crappy pages that I want to delete from a site. I've removed all the internal links to those pages and resubmitted new site maps that don't show the pages anymore, however the pages still index in search (as you would expect). My question is, what's the best practice for removing these pages? Should I just delete them and be done with it or make them 301 re-direct to a nicer generic page until they are removed from the search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
How to remove bad link to your site?
Hello, Our website www.footballshirtblog.co.uk recently suffered a major Google penalty, wiping out 6 months of hard work. We went from getting 6000-10000 hits a day to absolutely nothing from Google. We have been baffled by the penalty as we couldn't think of anything we've done wrong. After some analysis of Open Site Explorer, it seems I may have found the answer. There is a ton of bad links pointing to us. A few example domains are: ru.gg/ gogopzh.com/ 0575bbs.com/ This is nothing to do with us and so I can only assume some competitor has done this. As we were only about 4-5 months old, I guess Google has punished us. What do we do now? This is not a situation I have experienced before and would really appreciate your expert advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Removing URLs in bulk when directory exclusion isn't an option?
I had a bunch of URLs on my site that followed the form: http://www.example.com/abcdefg?q=&site_id=0000000048zfkf&l= There were several million pages, each associated with a different site_id. They weren't very useful, so we've removed them entirely and now return a 404.The problem is, they're still stuck in Google's index. I'd like to remove them manually, but how? There's no proper directory (i.e. /abcdefg/) to remove, since there's no trailing /, and removing them one by one isn't an option. Is there any other way to approach the problem or specify URLs in bulk? Any insights are much appreciated. Kurus
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurus1