How does the "first link" rule work with the "reasonable surfer patent" when it comes to the main navigation for a website?
-
In trying to figure out navigation for a new website, I am struggling with the first link rule vs. the reasonable surfer patent where the first link rule implies that Google "counts" the first link to a page including navigation, and the reasonable surfer patent that implies that navigation links carry less weight than body copy links.
What is the best solution for creating main navigation so that it doesn't take away from the body copy links?
-
If I understand you correctly, you are putting navigation links to 80k products? That sounds excessive. Look at how they do it at newegg.com and that is a good example of how to implement navigation for a large ecommerce site.
Something to keep in mind here. Internal links mean almost nothing compared to external inbound links. You want to make sure your content is all crawlable and accessible. After that, don't worry about nofollow and silly things about internal links. NEVER nofollow an internal link. Think about what nofollow is, what it means, and why it exists. You are telling Google a page on your site is not trusted. Bad signal.
Worry more about the inbound links to your site than the navigation links. Make sure you have a sitemap and ensure your content is all crawlable and accessible. If that's the case, don't worry yourself over nofollow or other minute navigation optimization.
-
Daniel, thanks for your reply. My question is, what if it's an e-commerce website with 80,000 products, combined under a multi-tier taxonomy, which looks like a NYC subway map? Should owners "do-follow" every link to product pages and static content like "contact us" and "privacy policy"?
-
I'll look into that CSS trick. It's not hiding text, it's just indenting the text, the block level element is still on page.
I remember reading that no follow blog actually, so my mistake.
-
Well said. You and Daniel are spot-on.
-
Amen. Couldn't agree more and looking forward to see this image replacement madness stop for once.
-
DO NOT add nofollow to your navigation! It still dilutes the link juice you pass out, it just doesn't actually pass the juice. It is like drilling a hole in your boat. Totally wasted link juice, for internal pages that should be getting link juice. The wasted PR doesnt go anywhere when you do that, it's just wasted.
-
Straight from Google's Webmaster Guidelines:
Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:
- Using white text on a white background
- Including text behind an image
- Using CSS to hide text
- Setting the font size to 0
I would not text indent or anything like that if I were you. Based on what Matt Cutts said last year at SMX Advanced, I would not nofollow any internal links either.
-
My personal technique is to use CSS image replacement to replace my first link, which is usually the logo. The style method is to give the text a negative indent of 9999px, and to set the element's background image to the logo, and use display: block; to keep the whole are clickable.
If you intent to link to all of your pages elsewhere on the page, you could opt to nofollow the navigation, as the other links will pass more relevant text.
Or another option would to be include the links as per usual, and ensure that there is a strong backlink profile to your landing pages, which will eliminate half of this problem entirely.
Aaron
-
I think you are misunderstanding the reasonable surfer patent. This means Google can weight links on a page differently based on the likelihood they will be clicked. The random surfer model for the original pagerank formula counted all links on a page the same, so if there were 20 links, each would pass 1/20th of that pages pagerank.
To adapt to the times, that model has changed so that if there are 20 links on the page, and 5 are navigation, 5 are sidebar, 5 are in the body and 5 are in the footer, then Google will probably have the body links pass more than the navigation links, which pass more than the sidebar links, which pass more than the footer links.
Just make your navigation as you normally would. There is nothing about the first link on the page or anything like that which should cause you any worry.
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
-
Does redirecting the existing URLs in the website without reducing our current rankings? The new website runs on the bubble, so it seems there is no provisions to redirect the existing URLs to this platform?
Hi Moz Fans, There are some clarification needed in a website revamping and loosing of current website rank. Please go through the questions and would be great if you like to share some insights on it. 1. We would like to revamp our existing website by joining hands with the bubble visual programming platform. Thus, kindly let us know if there are provisions to redirect the existing URLs to this platform. We would also like to know if this kind of redirecting affects the current website ranking. If yes, how can we redirect the existing URLs in bubble without reducing our current rankings? 2. As a part of the revamping of our website, we would like to enquire about the possibilities of its relaunch via bubble. Does it cause any changes for the current rankings of our website if we redirect the existing URLs via bubble? If yes, is there any provision to redirect the URLs without affecting the current ranking of the website?
Web Design | | OceanAirTravels0 -
Website Server Issue?
I'm getting error messages that a website cannot be crawled and it might be due to the following issues: Couldn't access the webpage because the server either timed out or refused/closed the connection before our crawler could receive a response. How to fix: Please contact your web hosting technical support team and ask them to fix the issue Could Possibly Be:
Web Design | | PrimeMediaConsulting
1. DDoS protection system.
OR
2. Overloaded or misconfigured server They asked me to talk to my hosting company about this issue and he's at a loss (I don't think he knows everything he needs to know potentially). Have you seen these issues before? Where is the best spot to start troubleshooting this issue?0 -
How to prevent development website subdomain from being indexed?
Hello awesome MOZ Community! Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing. An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content. The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines. My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites? Thanks!
Web Design | | SproutDigital0 -
Website rankings drop significantly after moving to new hosting provider
My website - www.isacleanse.co.nz has dropped from being top10 rankings for all of my keywords to not even being in top 50 after just checking now. It used to be hosted on: www.1stdomains.nz
Web Design | | IsaCleanse
It got migrated to Sitground servers about a month ago See attached screenshot - would moving hosting provider cause such a huge drop? Or would there be anything else I should be looking at ? J2ahi0 -
Navigational Change
Morning Mozzers, Currently our website has 2 navigation bars. The top Navigation is the typical **Home - Products - Services - Contact - About **type thing The side navigation contains a link to top level categories, if a category is selected it shows the child categories
Web Design | | ATP
Eg. Socks
Shoes
Boots Cateogry level (Socks) Blue Socks
Red Socks
Green Socks The top navigation has drop-down menus built in whilst the side nav does not. Would it be worthwhile to edit the nav bars so that the top nav bar contains the categories with the child categories displaying in dropdown list when clicked. Top Nav
Home - Socks - Shoes - Boots when hovering over socks you would see Socks
Blue Socks
Red Socks
Green Socks My reasons for the change I could remove the thin content "Products page" It would add a link to the categories and sub categories from every page on the website as it would be in the top navigation bar i think this would help with ranking for some of the sub-category pages that struggle. It would allow me to remove the left nav bar on the homepage, moving more content above the fold and give the website a more modern feel. What do you think? Is would this be a positive or negative change?0 -
Pin It Button, Too Many Links, & a Javascript question...
One of the sites I work for has some massive on-page link problems. We've been trying to come up with workarounds to lower the amount of links without making drastic changes to the page design and trying to stay within SEO best practices. We had originally considered the NoFollow route a few months back but that's not viable. We changed around some image and text links so they were wrapped together as one link instead of being two links to the same place. We're currently running tests on some pages to see how else to handle the issue. What has me stumped now though is that the damned Pinterest Pin Button counts as an external link and we've added it to every image in our galleries. Originally we found that having a single Pin It button on a page was pulling incorrect images and not listing every possible image on the page... so to make sure that a visitor can pin the exact picture they want, we added the button to everything. We've been seeing a huge uptick in Pinterest traffic so we're definitely happy with that and don't want to get rid of the button. But if we have 300 pictures (which are all links) on a page with Pin It buttons (yet more links) we then have 600+ links on the page. Here's an example page: http://www.fauxpanels.com/portfolio-regency.php When talking with one of my coders, he suggested some form of javascript might be capable of making the button into an event instead of a link and that could be a way to keep the Pin It button while lowering on-page links. I'm honestly not sure how that would work, whether Google would still count it as a link, or whether that is some form of blackhat cloaking technique we should be wary of. Do any of you have experience with similar issues/tactics that you could help me with here? Thanks. TL;DR Too many on page links. Coder suggests javascript "alchemy" to turn lead into gold button links into events. Would this lower links? Or is it bad? Form of Cloaking?
Web Design | | MikeRoberts0 -
Website platform
I read through this 2008 Moz post and comments: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/choosing-the-right-cms-platform-for-your-website-from-an-seo-perspective but a few years have passed since the discussion. I am looking to completely revamp my site which is primarily static and built on WordPress, and create a rich community environment that is highly interactive and serves the visitor well. The question continues to come up why I'm using WP vs DotNet vs Drupal vs Juumla. The honest answer is: 1) it's easy for a non-tech like me to update, 2) seems like a lot of plugins are available for use, 3) has a high adoption rate (stable) But also, I kind of don't know what I don't know. I wanted to open up the conversation to see why others favor a specific platform as it relates to the following needs: Must be non-tech EASY to use (no high learning curve Lots of plugins and interoperability - can add and remove as needed/times change Must support forum/community needs and conversations Must be able to create granular authentication / permissions for different audiences to see "permissioned" content BONUS if it can interoperate with MS Dynamics CRM (unfortunately, sigh) I've been burned in the past by using teams that had a predilection for a platform simply because they were comfortable with it - not because it was right for my needs. I have a hard time understanding pro/con conversations if the technologies are too focused on the tech and not enough of what the technology delivers, and I'm naturally resistant to technologies that require a techie, rather than a marketing expert to use them.Thoughts anyone? Would love to hear Mozer opinions - thanks in advance 🙂
Web Design | | JeanieWalker0 -
Meta author. Is it relevant for website design company in its seo?
We don't usually add the meta author in the websites that we develop. I wonder if it would have any positive effect in our seo. We usually add a link in the footer like this "Diseño Web Vigo "(Website Development in Vigo). I am worry about this links. I'm not sure if they are positive because they are in the footer and so the link appears in all of the pages. Besides all these websites we develop are hosted in two different servers, and google could easily think that it is manipulative thing. What do you think? Thanks!!! 🙂
Web Design | | teconsite.com0