Navigation

[dvansant]

I've been wrestling with this one for a while. Take a standard small web site navigation with nav links for:

• Products

• Solutions

• Support

• Learning Center

I believe having drop downs to show the sub-pages of each category provides a better user experience, but it also bloats my links per page in the navigation from 4 to 24. Most of the additional links are useful for user experience, but not search purposes. So, 2-years after Google's changing of how it treats nofollows (which used to be the easy answer to this question), what is considered best practice?

A) Go ahead and add the full 24 nav links on each page. The user experience outweighs the SEO benefits of fewer links and Google doesn't worry too much about nav links relative to main body links.

B) Stick to only 4 nav options. Having 20 additional links on every page is a big deal and removing them is worth the user experience hit. I can still get to all levels of this small site within 2-3 clicks and do cross category linking to mitigate silos.

C) Use some technical voodoo with js links or iframes to hide the nav links from Google and get the best of both worlds.

D) Do something that is not one of the first three choices.

Does anyone feel strongly about any of the above options or is this a user-preference type of situation where it doesn't make much difference which option you choose on a small 100-200 page site?

I'm really looking forward to everyone's thoughts on this.

-DV

[dvansant]

Thanks, Alan, you captured the dilemma perfectly. UI is important and SEO is important, so how does one quantify the pros and cons of each in the planning stages of a site. It's really kind of an educated guess.

I tend to lean towards your assessment for all of the reasons you cite. I'm in a competitive keyword space. So while I put a lot of weight on UI issues, I'm not inclined to ignore SEO opportunities for just minimal UI gains.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Derek

There are hundreds of factors right, so there's no way to know with 100% certainty in advance what the SEO hit would be with the nav change.  Any single change could have a significant impact, yet if all other core SEO factors are optimal, it might not have any impact at all.  Without testing, no way to know.

Personally I prefer to avoid the possible hit when I recommend nav to clients just because I do want to squeeze out every last ounce of value and honestly, if a site really only has 20 - 30 nav links, it's not such an inconvenience to users to have to click a main nav link and then find the sub-nav in each section as long as it's visually presented well.

If the information provided is highly relevant, that one extra click is not going to hurt the site.

[dvansant]

Interesting point about duplicate content. I suspect I'd have less of an issue with 20-30 links, but I could definitely see where DC could become a problem with larger navs. I like the breadcrumbs idea too.

I'm wondering if I'm placing too much emphasis on the too many links issue. However, to me it seems like a huge advantage to funnel link juice where I want it with well placed internal links in the body of content. I've had good success with this before. I would think that these targeted links would carry significantly more juice if I can reduce the number of links per page from 30 to 10 --- all by eliminating 20 nav links to less important pages. It just feels like a big SEO performance hit to me to have 200% more links in the nav? Am I wrong? Does Google not flow much link juice through nav links?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Derek

I encounter this scenario a lot on sites with not 24 but 100 or more links in that drop-down setup.  Here's what I've found.

A) User Experience MAY be improved, however only heat-map and click testing can prove if this is the case or not, and only when you do a/b split testing on the two versions of navigation. Sometimes giving people these choices is only barely helpful unless you also supplement this with additional user experience signals to help someone know where they actually are, especially when they come directly into the middle of the site.

B) From an SEO standpoint, it's not so much a "too many links" issue for distributing individual link value.  It's more a case where if you have all those links on every page of the entire site, at the code level, every page becomes slightly more diluted (all the extra text and words in the code) from a single-page topical focus issue.  You also have more of a duplicate content potential (the top area of the page now has a lot more "content" that's not unique on every page of the site.

The way to address this, if you believe the site-wide drop-down nav is important, is by taking the following action:

1. Be sure you have proper microformat coded breadcrumb navigation directly within the top of the main content area on each page.  This both helps users know more readily where they are in the site's content grouping and topical separation scheme, but also provides reinforced signals to search engines about content relationships that you lose with the top drop-downs.

2. Even with the top drop-downs, it's still beneficial to include section-specific navigation in a sidebar.  When a user has so many choices on every page of the site, it's easy to get lost in knowing which drop-down to use.  Not always, yet can be an issue.  Giving them the alternative that's always visible within each section, and unique to each section reinforces ease of navigation for those who prefer it.  It also communicates to Google topical relationships between all the pages in the section those side navigation links show up in.

3)  You may need to increase the depth of the actual content area descriptive paragraph based unique content.

[AaronSchinke]

I see where you are coming from, but with each required click you lose users. There are definitely times where I would sacrifice some usability for the sake of traffic, but accessibility is everything.

You are right on the mark with the give and take of SEO and user experience.

[dvansant]

Thanks for the reply, but please allow me to play devil's advocate.

I generally subscribe to users first mantra too, but is using subnavs on category pages vs. full dropdowns on every page a huge user experience hit? Taken to extremes, always choosing either a users always first approach or a SEO always first approach is not optimal. There has to be some measure of balance even if you lean heavily towards the users first approach (as I generally do).

Is there no meaningful benefit to removing from every page 20 links that provide no additional SEO benefit and only serve to dilute the impact of other more important links? Or, do you think that using full dropdown navs provides a truly significant user experience benefit?

[AaronSchinke]

A. You have to create it with users in mind. It will also help the site's connectivity which is good for SEO. Above all else the site should be easy to navigate for users.

[dvansant]

I should add that the 24 link scenario already includes consolidation of related topics, so the answer can't be more consolidation!