Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion

[DigitalLeaf]

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!

[scanlin]

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.

[DigitalLeaf]

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.

[scanlin]

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.