Too Many On-Page Links
-
Most of my pages have "Too Many On-Page Links".
If you view the website you will see this is mainly down to the top navigation drop down menu: http://www.cwesolutions.co.uk
So if I wanted to reduce the number of links I would have to have category links with landing pages.
How much does having "Too Many On-Page Links" effect my website ranking? Is it really important and would I notice a difference if I changed it?
-
In the sense that a report is alerting that there are too many links on a page though is going to be because it is warning of authority leakage more than anything else though.
Granted, the insertion of 'just' in my previous statement probably misleads...
I agree though that if you were to link every page to every page, it would just cause a royal headache to crawlers - why one would do that though is beyond me.
-
Sorry Pete, that was a typo where I meant to say 'internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage' (I've amended my reply).
-
To say "linking just dilutes the authority from the page" is not strictly true.
In this particular instance I do not believe that the menu is too OTT in terms of links but if you have every page linking to every page you just end up creating a mesh of links that search engines can waste crawl time trying to decipher.
Too many links with poor structure can mean that your crawl allocation is wasted which results in less of your pages being indexed properly.
-
Thanks Geoff, but want did you mean here...
Internal linkage is classed differently as internal linkage?
-
What makes you think you have too many on page links? Internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage, linking just dilutes the authority from the page (amongst other crawlability and usability factors), but if it's internal linkage, at least the authority is kept on your domain.
Simple, effective and easy to use navigation is critical to website usability and will have an affect on performance in search engines. In your example, I wouldn't expect any negative ranking affects to occur as a result of the style of navigation menu your website utilises. If that is deemed most useful for your customers, then that's the best approach.
-
Use a tool such as SEOmoz' Crawl Test or Xenu's Link Sleuth to determine any crawling issues. There are a number of free online tools for this too.
-
Thanks for your reply and explanation. One more question... How would I know if the bots are having a problem crawling my website?
-
Too many links on a page can make it difficult for bots to crawl your site. If you have over 100 links on page, make certain you have a sitemap that lays out a road map for the bots.
If your site is being effectively crawled, don't worry about it. I would worry if the linking structure is impacting the user experience or if deeper pages weren't getting crawled.
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
-
Is it important to keep your website home index page simple to rank better?
My website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ markets holiday cottages and it's grown from my own singular cottage into a small letting agency and I used to rank at best number 3 for the short tailed keywords like Whitby holiday cottages with its drop-down to position 10 on Google.co.uk. So this week I was looking for a UK business to help me improve my rankings and the first thing they said was my home page is detrimental with the listing too many conflicting info with it advertising all 12 properties on it. They suggested a door entry page into the site keeping it simple but when I run it through the analysing tool here on Moz for "Whitby holiday cottages" as an example it came out looking okay. I do the usual things of title tags and meta descriptions for my keywords etc any suggestions or advice would be very welcome thank you Alan
Web Design | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
Google result showing old Meta Title / Description even though page view source shows new info.
Hey guys! I'm struggling with why Google is ignoring my Meta Title / Description. I made a pretty drastic change to both about a week ago and on the results it hasn't changed. I'm on first page with several keywords and I think this weird caching is hurting me on where I'm at on the page. Thoughts / Ideas?
Web Design | | curtis_williams0 -
Our "home page" is behind a member wall, options?
So www.pch.com(portal) redirects to www.pch.com/unrecognized(landing page) if you are not registered with us and logged in. This means that the search engines are not logged in, so they see only our landing page. It used to be that there was no portal/home, on pch.com, that was just the landing page, but that changed about 6 months ago. We do rank for our brand terms, but my company would like to rank for terms like "sweepstakes." They DO understand why we don't, thankfully. They don't think SEO is magic voodoo. They get it. But they asked for options, as I have said that the portal on www.pch.com really is a good page to optimize for non-brand, core terms like sweepstakes....but only if the search engines can see it. I gave them these options, and they asked me to seek out more. So any thoughts would be good: 1. Best case scenario would be to abandon the landing page, just have the keyword rich portal page be the actual home page with no re-direct. (this won't happen, but I decided it needed to be first on my list). 2. Turn the portal into the home page (remove the redirect), but have the landing page overlay in a light box. This should, if I am not mistaken, be a best of both worlds situation, where the light box landing page would still have all of the value of the actual keyword rich portal page behind it. 3. If the landing page has to remain as it does now with the non-logged in redirect to it, change the URLs so that the landing page is www.pch.com and the portal becomes www.pch.com/members/ or something like that. Any other thoughts? Thanks! Kenn Gold Publishers Clearing House
Web Design | | Kenn_Gold0 -
Too Many On Page Links, rel="nofollow" and rel="external"
Hi, Though similar to other questions on here I haven't found any other examples of sites in the same position as mine. It's an e-commerce site for mobile phones that has product pages for each phone we sell. Each tariff that is available on each phone links through to the checkout/transfer page on the respective mobile phone network. Therefore when the networks offer 62 different tariffs that are available on a single phone that means we automatically start with 62 on page links that helps to quickly tip us over the 100 link threshold. Currently, we mark these up as rel="external" but I'm wondering if there isn't a better way to help the situation and prevent us being penalised for having too many links on page so: Can/should we mark these up as rel="nofollow" instead of, or as well as, rel="external"? Is it inherently a problem from a technical SEO point of view? Does anyone have any similar experiences or examples that might help myself or others? As always, any help or advice would be much appreciated 🙂
Web Design | | Tinhat0 -
Should I nofollow my blog "read more" links?
I have a standard blog index page with entries formatted as such: Blog title Blog excerpt read more link The blog title is linked to the blog post (duh). The "read more" link is also linked to the same blog post, but I put a rel="nofollow" tag on that link because I don't want the SE's thinking "read more" is relevant anchor text. Now, is what I'm doing right? Won't having the read more link as nofollow result in some sort of conflict considering the blog title link is set to follow? Will a nofollow link have a cascading effect on any matching "follow" link? I've frequently read that "read more" should be nofollowed, but I've never once seen anyone address the conflict of having a follow and nofollow link on the same page pointing to the same link. Which one wins? Thanks.
Web Design | | bluekite770 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0 -
Spammy page titles and the consequences
Hiya Mozzers! A pal who works in SEO has suggested I add the following type <title>tag structure to my pages:<br /><br />Bars in New York - Bars New York [no brand name]</p> <p>Pizzas in New York - Pizzas New York [no brand name]</p> <p>Firstly, I think this looks spammy, secondly, can't understand the logic of both combinations, thirdly, my understanding is brand name lessens importance of keyphrases, but it's still important from a branding point of view.</p> <p>Fourthly, is this sustainable? I mean, Google could identify this as spammy in the future, with penalty, no? Any feedback on these points would be very useful.</p> <p>Also, he said that I should play around with title tags on an ongoing basis, but I haven't changed any single title tag more than once/6 months for fear of being flagged for manipulative SEO practice by Google. Guidance here would be great as well.</p> <p>Thanking you in advance, Luke</p></title>
Web Design | | McTaggart0 -
Hiding Links Under A Tab As Good As Anything Else And More Attractive?
I'm working with a site that finds standard linking to spread authority to interior pages ugly. Here's what they don't like: footers tag clouds sidebar lists of links text heavy paragraphs with links a gallery of images with alt text/links So, I'm looking for other ways to link from their homepage to these less prominent pages inside the site. Here are my two questions: 1. Would something like this work, with the links under the "Specs" tab (p.s., this is just a random example and not my client): http://www.goincase.com/products/detail/CL57925/ 2. Any other ideas for spreading the authority via links from their homepage and other pages on the site to less powerful pages? Thanks! Best...Mike
Web Design | | 945010