Navigation Links
-
Our developers typically have a CSS driven html menu at the top of the page with links to inside pages. They then have the same links in the footer.
Does this double navigation cause any SEO issues or does Google disregard the second set of links?
Thanks,
Mark
-
Hi Mark,
My understanding is having Nofollow links will dilute the juice this passed to the dofollow links.
You can read more on that on from Rand.. here
I will veer off a little from what Mark said in that having the navigation in the footer as well as the top header area, maybe okay if the site warrants it. Most all cases I would follow Mark's advice, but in a case where the navigation in the bottom can be perceived has "helpful" to the user, then it would be okay to use it there as well.
In the end you can't always do everything that is considered "Good SEO Practices" simply because it helps your SEO, you must also follow good site design and useability practices. If having the navigation in the footer helps the user, and is aesthetically pleasing then I would say it is okay. The real trick of course is to merge Good SEO with both aesthetics and useability.
Hope that helps,
Don
-
What would the effect of no-following the footer links? Would it have any impact on the followed links at the top of the page?
-
Sorry - logged in with my agency account! The links are identical in the drop down menu and at the bottom of the page. I'm inclined to ask the designer to remove the footer links.
-
In this case the anchor text is identical.
-
Hi Mark,
It's a bit pointless having the same links in the menu at the top and then again within the footer. It's unlikely that users will click the links within the footer and as an SEO, you want to minimize the amount of links on a page as much as possible.
In reply to your question for whether Google disregards the second set of links, it depends how you interpret "disregard". Google will still crawl, follow (and the links will still count when it comes to pagerank calculation). Google will however disregard the anchor text - have you heard of the first link counts rule?
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
There are however 3 methods to avoid the 1st link counts rule:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule
Good luck!
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
-
Will Google Count Links Loaded from JavaScript Files After the Page Loads
Hi, I have a simple question. If I want to put an image with a link to another site like a banner ad on my page, but do not want it counted by Google. Can I simply load the link and banner using jQuery onload from a separate .js file? The ideal result would be for Google to index a script tag instead of a link.
On-Page Optimization | | CopBlaster.com1 -
Too much internal linking?
Hi everyone, Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number. On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug? I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170. kAeYlTM
On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez0 -
Should I use 'Click here' as an inbound link for my cornerstone content?
Hello Should I use 'Click here' as an inbound link for my cornerstone content? Example: For a full selection of our Facebook Event Attendee packages, please click here. OR Example: Please click the following link for a selection of our Facebook Event Attendee packages. This is my product page to help you better understand the context: LikeChimp
On-Page Optimization | | xdunningx0 -
Should I add canonical links to pages that are redirected?
Hello! I am a little confused concerning canonical links. I have several URLs that all access my page, but I redirect them all. A lot of places I am told to redirect them or use canonicals. Other places, I read that I should always use canonicals. What is the right way for me? If I should use canonicals as well as redirects, which links should I do this on? I redirect my pages like this: http to https:
On-Page Optimization | | hermanok
http://example.com -> https://example.com www to non-www:
https://www.example.com -> https://example.com Remove trailing slashes
https://example.com/ -> https://example.com Would-be 404-requests to index.php?p=$1
https://example.com/home -> https://example.com/index.php?p=home ( show as https://example.com/home ) Example:
http://www.example.com/home/ -> http://www.example.com/home/ -> https://example.com/home/ -> https://example.com/home -> https://example.com/index.php?p=home ( shows as https://example.com/home ) Thank you!0 -
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
Automated checking for broken links within content pieces
Hi, I am wondering if anyone can send me in the right direction on a system suggestion. We have currently grown out amount of content pieces on our website and our manual checking if the links in the content pieces are still 200 status is becoming extremely time consuming. Does anyone have a recommendation of a system that will crawl your pages and check both the internal and external links within the content for a status code (404,200,etc)? Preferably something server side so it can just run on a schedule but really anything would be fine. I have tried things like Screaming frog, etc and it just doesn't seem to be the right tool.
On-Page Optimization | | GoAbroadKP0 -
Too many outbound links on a page?
We have a "Clients" page on our site with approximately 125 of our clients listed. We have a link to each client's website, so that's 125 links. I am rethinking this approach. Is there any value to having these outbound links? The SEOmoz PRO analysis tells me I have too many links on this page. I have read that more than 100 links on a page is too many, but that seemed to be referring to internal links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Internal Linking
Hi Everyone, Should i be careful of how many internal links I have on one page? For example if i have a page that contains 700 words, can i have 5, 10, 15 internal links linking to other pages on my website? Is there a ratio for best practice. I know that internal linking is important for spiders to crawl your website but at the same time dont make it look spammy. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for any help.
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780