Structure: Should an eCommerce blog have main menu links to each of the store category pages?
-
Hi,
Should my eCommerce site's blog have menu links to the store's category pages? (like in the store itself)
The meaning is that every blog post page will have links to category pages that are not related and probably weakens the in-text relevant links.
The other option is to have menu links only to the blog category pages and in-article links to the relevant store category pages (maybe add menu button "Go to Store").
Thanks
-
Hello BeytzNet,
When people, including Matt Cutts, explain how the flow of pagerank works they tend to do it in simplistic terms to avoid confusing the situation, and to make sure that everyone understands the fundamental concepts.
Yes, at a fundamental level, the more links on a page the less pagerank flows through each of those links. However, it is quite a bit more complicated than this. Navigation links are treated differently than in-copy links. Footer links are treated differently than those at the top of the page. Sitewide links are treated differently than single links, etc...
When looked at this way, you can see how a link from within the body of a post is going to probably flow much more pagerank than one of the site-wide navigation links at the top of the page.
I agree with Maximillian that you should think about the best experience for your users. Here's an idea if you don't mind creating a totally separate page template and navigation...
Just show the top-level category page navigation on the blog instead of the complete drop-down list to sub-categories. This will drastically reduce the amount of links on the page while keeping the visual user-experience much the same for continuity and convenience. You can put the blog navigation in the sidebar.
That said, there really is nothing "wrong" with changing the look and feel of the blog from the main site if that is what you want to do. Just think about the visitor who has five items in their shopping cart already and decides to click on a link to a blog post, which then feels like a totally different website.
-
Thanks for the explanation and examples.
Keeping the same look and feel does make perfect sense.However, Overstock is actually a good point, they have dozens of "menu links" on the blog which disburse the link juice of the in-article links to practically nothing (being divided between so many pages).
When you look on a specific post inside TripAdvisror each link has a meaning, has power.
Don't you think Overstock is killing the power of the blog posts?
Thanks
-
I don't think there is really a right or wrong answer to this and I think you should be tackling it from a user experience angle, as opposed to an SEO one. It's generally thought of that links in the main navigation are there for a good reason, and shouldn't have an adverse on duplicate/diluting content. (within reason)
Do you think your customers would prefer the ease of navigation that keeping the same linking architecture consistent through out the site would bring? I know as a user I would, so that is how I implement it when adding blogs to eCommerce site whenever possible.
Say you had an article about Wool Socks. Your user might see the Wool Site menu link in the main navigation and might expect another dropdown so they can easily check the different types of wool socks without loading another page. I like to try and keep page clicks down to a minimum when a user is looking for pages.
But as I said, doing it either way is fine and many sites do, below are some examples:
Same linking architecture:
Main site: http://www.overstock.com/
Blog: http://www.overstock.com/blogsDifferent linking architecture:
Main Site: http://www.tripadvisor.com/
Blog: http://blog.tripadvisor.com/
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
-
What is the best structure for paginating comment structures on pages to preserve the maximum SEO juice?
You have a full webpage with a great amount of content, images & media. This is a social blogging site where other members can leave their comments and reactions to the article. Over time there are say 1000 comments on this page. So we set the canonical URL, and use Rel (Prev & Next) to tell the bots that the next subsequent block of 100 comments is attributed to the primary URL. Or... We allow the newest 10 comments to exist on the primary URL, with a "see all" comments link that refers to a new URL, and that is where the rest of the comments are paginated. Which option does the community feel would be most appropriate and would adhere to the best practices for managing this type of dynamic comment growth? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HoloGuy0 -
Viewing search results for 'We possibly have internal links that link to 404 pages. What is the most efficient way to check our sites internal links?
We possibly have internal links on our site that point to 404 pages as well as links that point to old pages. I need to tidy this up as efficiently as possible and would like some advice on the best way to go about this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Ecommerce Internal Linking Questions
I am a bit confused at internal linking for ecommerce site. Is it wise to link say all "boots" term in the review section to the boots page? Zappos is doing this. Wouldn't this incur penguin penalty? Since all internal anchor to that page is "boots" ? Scroll down to the bottom and checkout their reviews: http://www.zappos.com/tony-lama-6071l Is this the wise way to go about doing internal linking? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Internal Linking from Menu or body text or both with exact match keyword?
I used to have my menu link to every page with my exact match keywords. I am a Magician and have pages for each county / town so I had a link to /magician-hampshire with the anchor text Magician Hampshire in the menu. I recently had my website updated and the developer told me this was very spammy have a menu that said Magician Hampshire, Magician Surrey, Magician Berkshire He suggested that I should now have a menu structure that says Areas Covered>Hampshire - Surrey - Berkshire etc.Google will know my website is about a magician and relate the two together. Is this correct or should I revert my menu back to anchor text of Magician (County) I am running wordpress and he said the title attribute can say Magician Hampshire but the Visible text is for the user and not Google. I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text. When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu) Questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rnperki
Should I link to every main page from the Menu with the exact anchor text?
Does google only take into account the first link to a page it discovers?
Will it associate a link to a page with just the text of the county (Berkshire) to be related to Magicians in Berkshire as that is what the page is about? A few years ago I used to have at the bottom of each page Magician Hampshire | Magician Surrey | Magician Berkshire | Magician Sussex links - and to date a a lot of other Magicians employ this same technique. I was told google would slap them for it but so far it has not and it seems to be working for them. Many Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk0 -
Stopped ranking. Suspect links with keyword in blog posts and blog username. What to do? Disvow?
One of our staff thought it was a good idea to comment in 30 blogs in our niche using "keyword" as username in blog post linked to our website and additionally adding links to our website in the posts. We now got caught by panda or penguin (google confirmed no manual penalty was taken) and not ranking anymore for this keyword. No notification in webmaster tools neither. We have links from around 90 root domains of which 30 are from these blog posts. What would you suggest to do? Just building more legitimate links so that share of bad links goes down?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Using google disvow tool? We would then loose potential to get later legitimate links from these sites? Any ideas/suggestions?0 -
Are links from pages in other languages ok?
Hey everyone, what are your thoughts on this? If a bunch of links from another language, say the site is in Canada and is in English but we have french links pointing to the site with english keywords...is that ok? Will that harm us? Opinions? Facts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Do comment links on blogs help the blog itself rank?
Hi I have a blog - Carzilla.co.uk - and it keeps getting what are pretty obviously spam comments with links to unconnected websites of various quality. The blog is quite new and not ranking highly in SERPs for anything in particular yet. So my question is, is it better to let some of these comments through so google can see activity on the site? Or do spammy comments with links make the site look like a link farm? Any advice on what my policy should be - purely from a Google serps perspective - would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0 -
Google consolidating link juice on duplicate content pages
I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??0