Heavy Internal Linking Help

[MikeRoberts]

One of the sites I work on is a home improvement ecommerce website that does fairly well for its niche. One of the biggest problems that we're not sure how to adequately handle is a heavy internal linking issue. The homepage (http://www.fauxpanels.com/) has approx. 226 internal links which is mainly due to the navigation structure. There are far worse pages though (the Samples page http://www.fauxpanels.com/samples.php has over 800 internal links).

For the most part, management doesn't want any massive changes to the navigation layout. The Top navigation bar has a number of dropdown menus when you hover, the Left Navigation Bar expands to show more choices, and the Bottom navigation bar in many instances is just repeats of links that can be found elsewhere. Also, the product links in the body of the page can be found linked in the Left Navigation. This is not what I would personally consider the best way to handle navigation but the Customer Service Department has gotten numerous calls and emails over the years about how much people love our navigation and how easy it is to find things.

My thought was trying to lessen the amount of links by having things grouped more often into Category pages/hub pages where applicable so we can remove some of the links. We've also considered NoFollowing links but my understanding is that even if you NoFollow the link equity is still divided by the number of on-page links.

So, any of you much more experienced SEOs have any idea how I can lessen the heavy internal linking without completely re-doing the site's navigation layout and not harming link equity, ranking, etc.? Or, conversely, would you consider having an average 200-300 internal links per page not to be a real issue given the positive effect it has apparently had on user experience?

[Solvari]

Good to hear you are already working on the search bar. Expandable categories on the samples page could be a very good alternative as well. Just test a few different options to find the best solution!

[MikeRoberts]

Thanks Joram. Part of me was thinking the internal links were an issue of higher priority and the other half of me was thinking it's not that big of a deal if no one is having issues with it.

As for the Search Bar, one of our coders is currently in the process of tweaking our auto-complete to make search more robust... so that will be coming down the line in the relatively near future. We've found that most people using our search bar are searching for highly specific terms like model numbers which, unfortunately, if not perfectly entered wasn't returning the correct information (which is being worked on as well). I believe I've suggested to management in the past about making the search bar more prominent but with our current setup the only feasible way of doing this involved adding a second line to the Top Navigation which then caused some conflicts with the dropdown menus. (Its something I can look into again though).

The Samples page... yep, its a mess. I've actually suggested creating samples category pages to make things easier but that's been shot down. There was talk of using CSS to hide the various sections until someone clicked to expand but that was held off at some point. Might be worth giving up on lessening the internal linking and looking at that again to make Samples more manageable.

[Solvari]

If I was you I'd rather focus on keeping your site as user friendly as possible than trying to find out how much hundreds of internal links are or aren't harming your site's SEO. You said the site is doing fairly well, so I assume you haven't had major problems with rankings etc.

I think it's very positive that you keep listening to your customers, instead of ignoring them to change something of which you don't even know the effect. In the end it's better to have 100 visitors with 10% conversion, than 150 with 5%.

What you could test though is placing a larger version of your search bar on a more prominent place on your homepage. Especially a properly working search bar with auto-complete could help finding pages that are now hidden somewhere in your top menu. At first you just place this search bar in addition to the existing navigation. When your web analytics after a while show that many of your visitors use the search bar to navigate through your site, you might want to reconsider removing some of the links in your existing navigation.

About the samples page: I would split it up into separate pages for each category. This will bring the number of internal links down dramatically and makes it easier to find the sample you're looking for. Now the page is extremely long and it's difficult to find the right category. By using separate pages you can also create nice (keyword containing?) url's like /samples/carlton-brick-panels/.

Best of luck!