Navigation
-
An e-commerce site I am working on currently displays 6 Super-Categories with a drop down that contains about 100 Categories for items which filter down to sub-cats and then the actual products.
The issue is that every page starts off with these 100+ links just in navigation alone. I can only assume this is crippling our ability to spread link juice efficiently.
I have looked at larger sites that have moved towards side navigation. A few examples:
My issue is that we would like to move towards less links on the homepage to funnel our incoming links more efficiently but I cannot figure out how large sites cope with this. As far as I can tell they are using side nav that disappears after selecting a category of item in which the navigation is replaced with filtering tools and the nav is hidden above (see the sites above).
Is this the best way to handle this issue? Also is there a way to find out exactly what they are doing because I am trying to explain this to our IT person and I just get a response that our site is fine how it is and these navigation links don't affect anything...even though each page starts off with the same 100 follow links of navigation.
Thanks
-
When optimizing the navigation of your site it is best to consider the strength of the site at the same time.
If you have a powerful site it is possible that you could put MORE links in the navigation in an effort to expand the reach of your site. Anyone who is dominating their keywords should be able to expand navigation and not contract it - no matter how big it currently is. (If I owned walmart.com I would be comfortable adding more links to the flyout nav - they are getting more powerful in the SERPs. Amazon has been there for ages - they are very hard to defeat in the SERPs - but authority is responsible for much of that and not their linkage IMO)
If you have a weak site that is being defeated everywhere then the best action for you is to get working on the strength of your site. At this point you should have a navigation that makes sense to the visitor.
I cannot figure out how large sites cope with this. As far as I can tell they are using side nav that disappears after selecting a category of item in which the navigation is replaced with filtering tools
I think that they simply have different left navs for different categories and subcategories of the site.
On my sites we solve this with server-side includes... with wordpress you can do it with php... and you can also do it with custom programming that rewrites includes or the nav section of entire websites.
Is there a way to find out exactly what they are doing because I am trying to explain this to our IT person and I just get a response that our site is fine how it is and these navigation links don't affect anything...even though each page starts off with the same 100 follow links of navigation.
lol..... I think that you need to teach your IT person about SEO and your IT person needs to teach you about how websites work. Or... maybe better, I would recommend hiring an SEO to solve both of your knowledge gaps. You both need to know a lot more to run a competitive website.
If you have an IT person who will not accommodate your efforts to improve the SEO of your site then one of you needs to be looking for a new job.
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
-
JS reliant faceted navigation - ecommerce/blog - is it a bad idea?
I have noticed that some e-commerce sites don't worry aout their store working when JS is switched off - yet some do - are there any SEO implications of losing faceted navigation/filtering functionality when JS is disabled I tried M&S - didn't work - but Tesco did - when JS is disabled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Click To Reveal vs Rollover Navigation Better For Organic?
Hi, Any thoughts, data or insights as which is better in a top navigation... click to reveal the nav links or rollover to reveal the nav links? Regular content in an accordion (click to reveal) is evidently not best practice. Does that apply to navigation as well? Thanks! Best... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
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 -
Duplicate content issue with pages that have navigation
We have a large consumer website with several sections that have navigation of several pages. How would I prevent the pages from getting duplicate content errors and how best would I handle SEO for these? For example we have about 500 events with 20 events showing on each page. What is the best way to prevent all the subsequent navigation pages from getting a duplicate content and duplicate title error?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundbrix0 -
Ecommerce best-of-the-web article - big article - navigation tricks
Hello, We're writing our biggest article and trying to make it best-of-the-web. Custom illustrations, comprehensive content, maybe video slideshows How do I help people navigate this big thing? Is there some pretty navigation systems you've seen work? There's a lot of sections and my only idea so far is to use an anchor/id href attribute for each section having a big list of sections at the top of the article.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Techniques to fix eCommerce faceted navigation
Hi everyone, I've read a lot about different techniques to fix duplicate content problems caused by eCommerce faceted navigation (e.g. redundant URL combinations of colors, sizes, etc.). From what I've seen suggested methods include using AJAX or JavaScript to make the links functional for users only and prevent bots from crawling through them. I was wondering if this technique would work instead? If we detect that the user is a robot, instead of displaying a link, we simply display its anchor text. So what would be for a human COLOR < li > < a href = red >red < /a > < /li >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic
< li > < a href = blue>blue < /a > < /li > Would be for a robot COLOR < li > red < /li >
< li > blue < /li > Any reason I shouldn't do this? Thanks! *** edit Another reason to fix this is crawl budget since robots can waste their time going through every possible combination of facet. This is also something I'm looking to fix.0 -
URL Structure - Keywords vs. Information Architecture/Navigation
I'm creating the URL structure for an ecommerce site and was wondering if it's better to structure my URLs according to the most popular way people word their key phrases or by what makes most sense from a navigation perspective. Let's say I'm selling clothing (I'm not, just an example). I want the site to be open enough so a user can navigate by Person Type (Men's, Women's, Children's), Clothing Type (Shoes, Shirts, Hats), and Brands (Nike, Reebok, adidas). My gut and past experience say to structure the URLs from the least specific to the most specific: mysite.com/mens/shoes/nike But I know "men's Nike shoes" is searched for more than "men's shoes Nike", which would render this URL: mysite.com/mens/nike/shoes I know mysite.com/mens-nike-shoes would be best, but the folders setup is what I have to work with. So which is best for SEO? URLs that play to the structure of the most searched for key phrases? Or URLs that follow the information architecture/navigation of a site? Nate
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10