Too many links because mega menu within wordpress
-
I have a mega menu on my website with a lot of product categories. In my site analysis its coming up as a problem because there are too many links and its on every page. Is this something i should worry about or how should i correct it?
-
The more options the worse actually. Our brains aren't designed to interpret that many options at once, so minimizing the difficulty of decisions at each level helps.
The book "Don't Make Me Think," goes over the average visitors though process quite well, but here's my quick and dirty version:
- Like a restaurant menu that has everything broken down. People will quickly scan the menu looking for the classification of food that they want - appetizers, entrees, dinner, etc.
That's just like if they were on a website. They quickly scan to find what they want, even if it's the at the most macro level, and click that.
- Now, the next step depends on the size of the menu. With a huge menu they will probably filter it down again by picking Beef, Chicken or Pasta. On a small menu, though, they will probably have limited enough choices to be able to select their entree.
This is exactly like on your website. If you only have a handful of options after the first click, then they will be able to select one. However, if you have hundreds of options, such as a clothing store, then they will want to filter it down again.
This creates an optimal user experience, and helps focus your authority to your main category pages. Linking to everything dwindles down the authority with too many internal links on each page, so it makes you spend a lot more time on link building then you actually needed.
Now, well established sites are a little different because they have so many external links pointing at them. However, you will still see Amazon limit the number of links on it's home page to the main categories. For example, on the home page they link to Children's Books, but not to Children's Books ages 6-8. That's because more people search for Children's Books, and they want to make sure that the authority they pass from the home page goes to a page that is more useful to rank for. Also, with the amount of time they spend analyzing their analytics you know they would adjust if the user experience suffered at all from designing it like this.
-
Makes sense.
So as we see more and more ecommerce websites using larger menus with many options, I would think that these would actually improve the customer experience because the visitor is able to see more specific categories, thus getting to their destination quicker.... How are these websites getting around that and still performing well?
-
The amount of authority a page can pass is divisible by the number of links. So, let's say you have a site authority of around 100 (this is just a random number to make my math easier). If a page can pass around 90% of it's authority to pages it links to, and you have 100 links on the page, then each page is going to receive about .9 points of authority. However, if you dropped it down to 10 links, each page would get 9 points of authority.
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
Now, there are enough articles confirming that a page can pass around 85+% of it's authority, but there is no exact science when we test for correlation. Regardless, the more links you have on a page will decrease the amount of authority each page receives. So, if you want your next level pages to rank better, you should be inclined to decrease the number of links, especially on the home page, and try to pass more authority to those pages.
This also drops into the user experience problem. People want to be able to find what they are looking for immediately. A menu with 100 different options, including the drop downs, isn't going to help you achieve that results. Instead, you would be better off creating the main menu options, the one you see on the home page, with 7 or fewer options. That way people can quickly find where they are going. Then, when they select one of those options they get an increase in available options on the next level.
This is what the Telegraph, who hired Distilled - one of the best SEO agencies out there, does: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
This creates an optimal user experience, as well as controlling how the page rank/authority/link juice flows through the website. I believe Bruce Clay calls this process "creating a silo."
To do this easily in Wordpress look into conditional menus.
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
-
Curious, anyone ever had over half of their indexed links drop on an e-commerce site?
In a year went from around 300k indexed pages to around >100k according to GWT. Could this be duplicate content issue, lost links, spam, aged links or all of the above? either way an audit is in order. Thanks! Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Pro's & Con's of Wordpress Categorys & Tags
Good Afternoon! I touched on this question a while back in another post specifically regarding a plethora of duplicate pages that I was finding due to inappropriate tagging in wordpress. As I am going through our website, I am starting to notice it happening again with categories as well. I am including some pictures where you can see the URL structures and titles etc of how everything is laid out. I would like to clarify that I was not the one who did any of this Is it wrong/bad to cross categorize? What I mean by that is put something in more than one category? Would there be any drawback to converting any of these into subcategories? Would that even do anything? Does having two pages that are named the same thing, hurt you? It would seem to me that Google wouldn't like that. I have recently come into the field of thought that Google is getting more and more human, and If it makes a human uncomfortable/confused it will make Google confused. In my pictures you can see we clearly have numerous hard copies of the same thing, not just duplicate elements created by wordpress, that is a separate issue. I personally want to change all of the titles and make everything as different and individual as possible, but i also could be very wrong in my desire to do that. Any thoughts are appreciated! eY4iX2N N3AVqss JZpU7Rq
Reporting & Analytics | | HashtagHustler0 -
Mysterious Referral Link
This keeps coming up in some of our top Referrals on our website in Analytics. Does anyone know what it is? We have tried researching it and have had not luck. http://vizedhtmlcontent.next.ecollege.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | TracSoft0 -
Linking Multiple Niche Site In Same Google Analytics Account
Hi, I am providing SEO for Local business. Is it advisable to separate out the Google Analytics into different Google account or is it ok to remain it this way? Some of the client might be in the same niche, and might be competing with the same keywords as well. What I was worried is, Google might see these sites as same owner and only rank for 1 of the site. I was thinking to get the owners to register for their own Google Analytics and share the access to me.
Reporting & Analytics | | JonathanSoh0 -
Total Linking Root Domins
I'm still very new to link building and SEO, (only one month in!) I have a reasonable starting point as our web site is fairly well designed but I have a long way to go to catch up in what is a very competitive market! (Music Retail). My question is regarding Open Site explorer and its ability to accurately reflect back links. Looking at total quantity of unique back link domains Open Site currently has me at 36 domains, Google webmaster tools has me at 187!! The one site that all my 'watched' competitors has is DMOZ, this gives them a great boost on the SEOmoz and open site rankings. I have 3 links on DMOZ and they all show up on my Webmaster tools yet don't show on either SEOmoz or open site. I've left it for a couple of months to see if it caught up but no real change. My worry is that there seems little value in the SEOmoz tools if their not at least as complete as Google webmaster is to allow me a fair comparison! Is there anything wrong with my setup on SEOmoz??
Reporting & Analytics | | rattleanddrum0 -
Do links tagged with Analytics UTM parameters has the same significance as once without any parameters?
If we add UTM parameters to inbound links, for tracking specific referral behavior, will those link have the same SEO significance as links without parameters?
Reporting & Analytics | | Usearch0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
I'm getting the warning of "Too many on-page links". I have a number of affiliate marketing sites, all Wordpress, all with sidebars. In the header navigation bar is a link that offers "reviews" and links to each product/brand. This is not a drop down link but leads to a page with product links. Also, in the sidebar I have links that also lead to the products/brands. Redundant yes, but in the beginning this seemed to be a good practice in site design. It would be easy to simply remove the widget that contains the link process in the sidebar. The problem may simply be that the sidebar is the same for every page in the site(s). Is this hurting total SEO as my sites are all over 95-percent indexed. One site in particular does very well in traffic and sales so is removing these links potentially going to improve my SEO and ultimately by success? Thanks, Don
Reporting & Analytics | | JavaManOne0 -
On what report do I get to know where do the external links come from?
I need to get a list of the external links. I don't find that report, where do I get it?
Reporting & Analytics | | carloscontinua0