Site Navigation
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav.
Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are:
1. Category
ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden
2. Subcat
ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath
3. Family
ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories
Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them.
Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts?
Thanks!
-Zack
-
Thanks Takeshi thats good advice, I am going to try and figure out how to test it.
-
My personal preference when it comes to navigation is fewer options than too many. The tendency is to want to put everything in there, "just in case", but most users will not even click on a fraction of those links, and you can end up confusing people with too many options.
I would install a click tracker such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale (or use Google in-page analytics) to figure out which links people are actually using, and then remove the ones people aren't clicking on as much. I'm also a big fan of changing the navigation based on what section of the site you are, so when you're on the homepage the navigation might only display the top level categories, but when you drill down it shows you more categories.
As for SEO impact, there are both pros and cons. On the one hand, you reduce the number of links per page (general recommendation is around 100 links per page), but you will no longer be linking to those sub-sub-categories from your home page. My suggestion, as with any large sitewide change, would be to test it. Test removing the links for a week or two, and see if it has any impact on SEO or user metrics. Then decide whether to keep them or leave them based on actual data.
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
-
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
Same server for different client sites?
Hi everyone - I have a question about whether it's OK for us to host several of our client's websites on the same dedicated web server, without this causing problems in SEO. I know the issues with duplicate content etc., but for background - we provide website services to a particular sector (antiques/auctions). All our clients are distinct, and have written their own copy etc., but because they're all in the same sector, their websites will - largely - talk about the same types of things - so the content is not duplicated, but it's similar in topic, I guess. Does anyone feel it would cause a problem if we were to put several (say about 😎 of our client's websites on the same dedicated web server, or would we be better spreading the sites over different shared servers? Come to think about it, if we are spreading those same 8 sites across 4 virtual servers - but all hosted by the same company - presumably Google would know that too? Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this! Nikki
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Go-Auction0 -
Combining multiple HTTPS sites
Hi there! I am currently combining several sites (corporate brochure site and ecommerce site) for a client into one central website. All of the content and structure on the new site is set up and relevant pages have 301 redirects ready. My main concern is that the old .co.uk website has an SSL certificate and will be pointing to the new pages on the new .com website (with new SSL in place). Will this cause connection privacy issues? And if so, what's the best way to resolve them? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_GlueMedia0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
New site - when will it rank?
We changed our domain 6 weeks ago as we had a penalty we couldn't shake off... My question is: How long will it take to rank for our keywords. I appreciate this is a difficult questions as there are a lot of factors that will effect our ranking. Do Google wait a period of time before allowing a new site to rank well?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
Need help or explanation on my site!
My site has suffered greatly since the recent Google update. I have done everything as suggested. I have had all bad links removed over 2 months ago. I have lowered keyword density (not easy since the keyword is in our company name!). I have rewritten various content and bolstered our existing content. What gives? What can I do? As an example the keyword, "maysville plumber" - I rank about 40th for this keyword. The first three pages are filled with websites with literally NO content or no added value. Maysville is a town of about 1k residents - there is no competition. Before the update I was #1 for years on this particular keyword. And this is the case with 35 other cities (mostly small cities, but a few larger ones). Please help me understand or suggest what I can possibly do at this point. We have hundreds of pages of unique content on each and every page. We have zero duplicate content (I have ran tests and crawlers). We have no fishy links. I have not gotten any messages from google on Webmasters. PLEASE HELP!! I asked a similar question a little while back and fixed all of the suggestions. My site is www.akinsplumbing.net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0 -
Clone sites at new company
I just came in house to our company for SEO. We have one main site and 182 that are exact duplicates and almost exact clones of the main site. It's no surprise that half of these clones are deindexed already. The meta tags are just the domain name URL. I want to add unique text on the home page to each site, fix the meta tags and switch them up so they aren't clones. Other than a huge rewrite of the code for each site, I'm not sure what else to do to prevent the rest from getting deindexed. Is there any way to prevent the rest from getting deindexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0