Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Are pages not included in navigation given less "weight"
-
Hi, we recently updated our website and our main navigation was dramatically slimmed down to just three pages and no drop down under those. Yet we have many more important pages, which are linked to once on one of those main three pages. However, will this hurt those other pages because they are not included in navigation (some of which were starting to get good traction in rankings)?
Thanks! -
I am confident that the pages in your persistent navigation are given more weight by Google.
On each of my sites I have a sidebar that presents a categorized list of links to the important pages that I want everyone to see. They could be there because I want them to be given attention by google, because I want them to have an opportunity to be seen by every visitor, because they are new and I want to promote them, or because they are important sales pages. The strategies and categories are different for every site.
If someone lands on your site and sees three links to other pages, what message does that send? Nuthin' here? If someone lands on your site and sees a great presentation of inviting topics, what message does that send. If you want people to see what you have, don't make them dig for it. If you have great content, get it out there and flaunt it.
Some of my good friends are designers who proselytize the concept of minimalist design. They think that I should have no more than three to five links on any page. They "tisk tisk" when they look at a site like mine. But, each of my sites has more traffic than all of theirs combined.
-
Great answer Dirk and I completely agree.
-
Hi,
2 things can have an impact on the underlying pages:
1. Your navigation is appearing on all pages - so the pages that are linked to from the navigation will get internal links from all the other pages of your site.
While internal links are less important than external ones, they still play a role in telling Google how important the pages are (=more links is more important). Removing important pages from the navigation will result in a (substantial) lower amount of internal links to these pages2. If the pages that were previously in the navigation are not linked to from the home page they will be 1 click further away from your homepage (same goes for the underlying pages). How deeper the content is in your site, the less likely it is that it will rank. This might have an impact as well.
So yes, it can have an impact. On the other hand - you also have to keep your visitors in mind. If you had one of these huge dropdown menus before with lots of different links, and now a very clean and logical navigation, it could have a positive impact on the user experience. This would be reflected by things like time on site, bounce rate,...etc and would have a positive effect on rankings.
Just my 2 cents,
Dirk
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
-
How is Single Page Application (SPA) bad for SEO
Hi guys. I am quite inspired of SPA technique. It's really amazing when all your interaction with the site is going on the fly and you don't see any page reloads. I've started implementing the site with this instruction and already found nice guys to make the design. The only downside of the using SPA which I can see **is the **SEO part. That's because the URL does not really change and different pages don't have their unique URL addresses.
Web Design | | Billy_gym
Actually they have, but it looks like: yoursite.com/#/products yoursite.com/#/prices yoursite.com/#/contact So all of them goes after # and being just anchors. For Google this mean all of these pages is just yoursite.com/ My question is what is really proven method to implement the URL structure in Single Page Application, so all the pages indexed by Google correctly (sorry I don't mention the other search engines because of market share). The other question, of course, is examples. It will be great to see real life site examples, better authority sites, which use SPA technique and well indexed by search engines.1 -
Incorporating Spanish Page/Site
We bought an exact match domain (in Spanish) to incorporate with regular website for a particular keyword. This is our first attempt at this, and while we do have Spanish speaking staff that will translate/create a nice, quality page, we're not going to redo everything in Spanish page. Any advice on how to implement this? Do I need to create a whole other website in Spanish? Will that be duplicate content if I do? Can I just set it up to show the first page in Spanish, but if they click on anything else it redirects to our site? I'm pretty clueless on this, so if anything I've suggested is off-the-wall or a violation, I'm really just spit-balling, trying to figure out how to implement this. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Spaces at beginning of title tag - negatively affect the optimization of the page?
For some reason, our title tags have a long space after the beginning title tag and before the text appears. The beginning title tag is on one line, then a break, a tab and then the content of the title tag. I'm pretty sure this is not good and is affecting optimization of the page. Am I correct or is this not an issue and does not need to be fixed? Example: | <title></span></p> <p> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"> First keyword</td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?
what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page? My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about. Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google? I'm not really sure. He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users. This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site. I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions. Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
CSS vs Javascript vs JQuery drop down navigation
For a user / seo perspective, what is the best way to code a drop down menu nav bar? Is it best to use css, javascript or a scripting library like jquery? I am thinking about overall best practice that will not have a negative impact on serps. I am also thinking about what will work best on all types of devices i.e. desk tops, lap tops, smart phones and tablets. What are the Pro's & Cons of Using CSS for Drop Down Menus. What are the Pro's & cons of using Javascript for drop down menus. And the same question for jquery. Thank you all in advance for your ideas.
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Custom 404 Page Indexing
Hi - We created a custom 404 page based on SEOMoz recommendations. But.... the page seems to be receiving traffic via organic search. Does it make more sense to set this page as "noindex" by its metatag?
Web Design | | sftravel0 -
How to Add canonical tags on .ASPX pages?
What is the proper way (or is it possible) to add canonical tags on website pages that end in .aspx? If you add a canonical tag to the Master Page it will put that exact canonical tag on every page, which is bad. Is there a different version of the tag to put on individual pages? And one to put on the home page without the Master Page error?
Web Design | | Ryan-Bradley0 -
How is link juice split between navigation?
Hey All, I am trying to understand link juice as it relates to duplicate navigation Take for example a site that has a main navigation contained in dropdowns containing 50 links (fully crawl-able and indexable), then in the footer of said page that navigation is repeated so you have a total of 100 links with the same anchor text and url. For simplicity sake will the link juice be divided among those 100 and passed to the corresponding page or does the "1st link rule" still apply and thus only half of the link juice will be passed? What I am getting at is if there was only one navigation menu and the page was passing 50 link juice units then each of the subpages would get passed 1link juice unit right? but if the menu is duplicated than the possible link juice is divided by 100 so only .5 units are being passed through each link. However because there are two links pointing to the same page is there a net of 1 unit? We have several sites that do this for UX reasons but I am trying to figure out how badly this could be hurting us in page sculpting and passing juice to our subpages. Thanks for your help! Cheers.
Web Design | | prima-2535090