Navigation
-
An e-commerce site I am working on currently displays 6 Super-Categories with a drop down that contains about 100 Categories for items which filter down to sub-cats and then the actual products.
The issue is that every page starts off with these 100+ links just in navigation alone. I can only assume this is crippling our ability to spread link juice efficiently.
I have looked at larger sites that have moved towards side navigation. A few examples:
My issue is that we would like to move towards less links on the homepage to funnel our incoming links more efficiently but I cannot figure out how large sites cope with this. As far as I can tell they are using side nav that disappears after selecting a category of item in which the navigation is replaced with filtering tools and the nav is hidden above (see the sites above).
Is this the best way to handle this issue? Also is there a way to find out exactly what they are doing because I am trying to explain this to our IT person and I just get a response that our site is fine how it is and these navigation links don't affect anything...even though each page starts off with the same 100 follow links of navigation.
Thanks
-
When optimizing the navigation of your site it is best to consider the strength of the site at the same time.
If you have a powerful site it is possible that you could put MORE links in the navigation in an effort to expand the reach of your site. Anyone who is dominating their keywords should be able to expand navigation and not contract it - no matter how big it currently is. (If I owned walmart.com I would be comfortable adding more links to the flyout nav - they are getting more powerful in the SERPs. Amazon has been there for ages - they are very hard to defeat in the SERPs - but authority is responsible for much of that and not their linkage IMO)
If you have a weak site that is being defeated everywhere then the best action for you is to get working on the strength of your site. At this point you should have a navigation that makes sense to the visitor.
I cannot figure out how large sites cope with this. As far as I can tell they are using side nav that disappears after selecting a category of item in which the navigation is replaced with filtering tools
I think that they simply have different left navs for different categories and subcategories of the site.
On my sites we solve this with server-side includes... with wordpress you can do it with php... and you can also do it with custom programming that rewrites includes or the nav section of entire websites.
Is there a way to find out exactly what they are doing because I am trying to explain this to our IT person and I just get a response that our site is fine how it is and these navigation links don't affect anything...even though each page starts off with the same 100 follow links of navigation.
lol..... I think that you need to teach your IT person about SEO and your IT person needs to teach you about how websites work. Or... maybe better, I would recommend hiring an SEO to solve both of your knowledge gaps. You both need to know a lot more to run a competitive website.
If you have an IT person who will not accommodate your efforts to improve the SEO of your site then one of you needs to be looking for a new job.
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
-
HREF LANG: Different navigation/structure per country: is that a problem?
Hi all, One question about the href lang tag. Our webshop sells to 4 different countries (the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium & Spain). The navigation is a little bit different for these countries, depending on how popular certain product categories are in certain countries. So, for example: Netherlands --> Category A and B are in the top navigation
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
Germany --> Category B is a subcategory of product A. We want to implement the Hreflang tag, would it be a problem that the navigation/site structure (and therefore the URL structure for certain categories) are a bit different? So: The url for category B in the Netherlands is: https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/
The url for category B in Germany is: https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ Thanks in advance! Best!0 -
Navigation Menu - Whats too much
Ive always had pages set up for a lot of our products and had these in the navigation menu. For instance we sell Solar Control Window Film which helps with heat, glare and UV. We then have a navigation menu something like this: Solar Window Film
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fozzy1609
Heat Control window Films
Anti glare window film
UV window film
etc etc Ihave this for all my services and products. I have unique content on each. My question is this. Would I be better having the naviation menu with links to all the seperate services we offer
OR
Should I have it linking to the main services and then the related services from within the page> For example Ill have just Solar Window Film in the navigation and then on the page it would internally link to the heat related section and the glare related section etc. Im wondering whether my sub pages would suffer because theyre not linked to from every page with the second method or whether it would help in some way0 -
Realtor site with external links in navigation
I have a client with a realtor site that uses IDX for the listings feed. We have several external links going over to the IDX site for various live custom searches (ie: luxury listings, waterfront listings, etc...). We are getting a Moz spam ranking of 2/7 for both "Large Number of External Links" and "External Links in Navigation". Chances are, these are related. My question is this: (1) Being the score is only 2/7, should I bother with fixing this? (2) If I add a rel="nofollow" to all the site-wide links (in header, footer & menu) will this help? I couldn't find anything definitive in the Q&A search. Looking forward to any insights!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcallander1 -
Pros vs Cons - Navigation/content embedded within javascript
My programmer showed me this demo website where all the navigation and content is embedded within javascript: http://sailsjs.org/#! Google site search returned 51 in results, all pages pretty much unique Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Bing site search returned 24 results with pretty much identical Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Matt Cutts said it's fine but to test first: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mibrj2bOFCU Has anyone seen any reason to avoid this web convention? My gut is to avoid this approach with the main drawback I see is that websites like this won't do well on search engines other than Google that have less sophisticated algorithms. thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Ecommerce best-of-the-web article - big article - navigation tricks
Hello, We're writing our biggest article and trying to make it best-of-the-web. Custom illustrations, comprehensive content, maybe video slideshows How do I help people navigate this big thing? Is there some pretty navigation systems you've seen work? There's a lot of sections and my only idea so far is to use an anchor/id href attribute for each section having a big list of sections at the top of the article.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Ever Wise to Intentionally Use Javascript for Global Navigation?
I may be going against the grain here, but I'm going to throw this out there and I'm interested in hearing your feedback... We are a fairly large online retailer (50k+ SKUs) where all of our category and subcategory pages show well over 100 links (just the refinement links on the left can quickly add up to 50+). What's worse is when you hover on our global navigation, you see the hover menu (bot sees them as ) of over 80 links. Now I realize the good rule of thumb is not to exceed 100 links on a page (and if you did your math, you can see we already exceeded that well before we let the bots get to the good stuff we really wanted them to crawl in the first place). So... Is it wise to intentionally shield these global nav links from the bots by using javascript?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrwestern0 -
URL Structure - Keywords vs. Information Architecture/Navigation
I'm creating the URL structure for an ecommerce site and was wondering if it's better to structure my URLs according to the most popular way people word their key phrases or by what makes most sense from a navigation perspective. Let's say I'm selling clothing (I'm not, just an example). I want the site to be open enough so a user can navigate by Person Type (Men's, Women's, Children's), Clothing Type (Shoes, Shirts, Hats), and Brands (Nike, Reebok, adidas). My gut and past experience say to structure the URLs from the least specific to the most specific: mysite.com/mens/shoes/nike But I know "men's Nike shoes" is searched for more than "men's shoes Nike", which would render this URL: mysite.com/mens/nike/shoes I know mysite.com/mens-nike-shoes would be best, but the folders setup is what I have to work with. So which is best for SEO? URLs that play to the structure of the most searched for key phrases? Or URLs that follow the information architecture/navigation of a site? Nate
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10 -
Site navigation menu in head of page for SEO
We are considering expanding our site navigation menu (horizontal) at the top of our pages. However, once implemented, this would include around 30-40 links at the top of the page; before the content of the page. How much effect (good/bad) would this have on SEO? Are their any other options? (perhaps rendering the menu after the main content with CSS)? Any thoughts, suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640