Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
-
Hi,
I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store.
The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first.
a) Manual Observation
Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links.
Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal.
b) Link Sleuth
I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this -
Level Pages
0 1
1 42
2 860
3 3268
Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source).
Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2).
Thankyou!
-
Well, external links to pages are 80% of the ranking factor for the page. That has nothing to do with your internal nav link structure. But, yes, internal juice will flow 1/750th to each page that the nav structure points to.
-
From an SEO perspective, what about inbound links to the catalogue page? Wont the link power be spread over 750 links and then making the sub sub sub catalogue pages as equally powerful as the sub catalogue pages?
It just seems "the spread of juice" will not be pyramidal.
-
Yikes. 750 links (even if split into sections so you don't see them all at once) on 1 page is not 'human-friendly' (as I know you know). Is that really necessary? I looked at the site and having navigation sub-menus that go 4-deep is kind of a usability issue for people that aren't great with a mouse. Maybe look at ebay's menu structure; they certainly have a large db of products in many categories and don't resort to 100s of links per page just for navigation.
But from and SEO point of view I'm not sure the 750 links are hurting your on-page ranking for a phrase that the page is otherwise optimized for. If you had a page optimized for "widgets" and you did all the correct on-page things for 'widgets' and then had external links pointing to the page with anchor text of 'widgets' then I'm not sure how much you'd be penalized for having 750 links on that page. Given that on-page factors are only about 20% of the ranking equation anyway, I'm not sure it's a huge deal from an SEO/ranking point of view. It's more of a human usability thing, IMO.
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 would you build links to this page?
Hi i have ecommerce store and currently we are looking to build links to category pages like: http://www.theiconic.com.au/womens-clothing-dresses-party-dresses/ What are some natural ways to build links to a page like this? Our SEO agency has done guest posting and forums but these are not natural link building methods and against Google policy. Any suggestions on how to build natural links to these pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak651 -
Can one back-link fluctuates ranking of website with thousands of back-links?
It happend to our website. We have seen major ranking fluctuations for our website because of one back-link. What kind of links those can be? Why Google is not stopping them even though they claim that such back-links will be taken care of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Canonical Confusion
So I have products appearing in several categories, all of which have the correct canonical url. But Moz is flagging up pages I never knew existed, and I don't understand why they exist at all and more so why my canonical fix isn't occurring for them, as below: SEO Friendly URL: http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2 Weird URL to same product: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=themecontrol/product&product_id=159 Is this a developer problem rather than an SEO problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Link building - still effective ?
Hi, I know 70-80% of the links on Google have no-follow keyword. What I need to know is if link building by using guest posting and a combination of no-follow links through social media is still effective ? What would you suggest in terms of link building. I have read all the articles on moz and everything, but I need a personal touch on this matter. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kiraftw
Andrei0 -
To recover from Penguin update, shall i remove the links or disavow links?
Hi, One of our websites hit by Penguin update and I now know where the links are coming from. I have chance to remove the links from those incoming links but I am a little confused whether i should just remove the links from incoming links or disavow the links? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
301 vs 302
We recently launched a redesign and I noticed from running a crawl using Screaming Frog SEO that our redirects are all being seen as 302. I know 302 is a temporary redirect, but does this hurt SEO rankings when all our redirects are being seen as 302s instead of 301s? Also, the way I implemented the redirects was by using the IIS Manager Tool. Is it possible that our IIS Manager Tool is not configured properly and instead of adding the redirect as 301, it is inserting it into the rewrite file as 302s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec0 -
Counting over-optimised links - do internal links count too?
To whit: In working out whether I've too many over-optimised links pointing to my homepage, do I look at just external links -- or also the links from my internal pages to my homepage? In other words, can a natural link profile from internal pages help dilute overoptimisation from external links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
SEO vs 301
I have a website about "Download of games" and im planning open one about "games online" i know that "games online" its super hard to get good ranks, soo im thinking and do a 301 from my website of "download games" to my new website, do you think that is a good strategy ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nafera21