What is the best top menu linking structure (for SEO) for my site: A or B?
-
I don't know if these two scenarios are any different as far as SEO is concerned, but I wanted to ask to get an opinion.
On my website: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com you can see there is a top menu with "About" "Info" "Questions" etc. Some of these links lead to further pages that are essentially a indeces for multiple further links.
My question is: in terms of SEO, is it better to A) have all links (that are now on the pages that the menu links lead to) displayed in a drop down menu directly from the top menu (and bypassing an intermediate page) or B) to have it as it is now where you have to click to an intermediate page (like "rain chain info") to get access to the links (and not have such a large drop down menu)
Is there a difference in terms of SEO? In terms of useability it almost seems like a toss up between the two, so if there were better SEO value to one of the other, then I would choose that one.
By the way, I know that the way it is structured now is strange, where there is only one drop down that leads to the same page as the top menu item, but that will be fixed, fyi.
Thanks!
-
Thanks!
-
Hmm, can't replicate it and just ran your site through Xenu to crawl it and it would appear it was just me navigating using the address bar.
I doubt many people will be doing that, though I often change through sections on ecommerce sites directly.
However it does show up things like http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/all-products/products/large-copper-pails-rain-chain and http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/styled-cup-designs/products/large-copper-pails-rain-chain
So rel=canonical or maybe a redirect on the product pages wouldn't hurt
-
I think I might be adding a bunch more links on some of those pages, but perhaps I'll make most of them link directly from the top menu and then some of those links will link to pages with more links (like an article index). Cool, thanks.
One questions though (and thanks for bringing it to my attention): how did you get to this same page with two links?
and
http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina
I can only get to that page through the first url above. Where is the link that leads to the page with the second url?
-
If you had all pages linked from the home page, and all pages linking back to the home page but no other pages, this would rank your home page the highest, but it may not be the best for your users.
-
Are you likely to get a lot more pages/products?
If not having everything accessible via drop downs would be my preference, not least of all as a user because if you make me click to a page to get to another page I'm not going to be sticking around long and search engines do want you to think about the users.
This is replicated in search engines by pages you have to click twice to get to being further down the link juice chain even if it's the next subfolder down in terms of URLs.
Actually looking at it, is is possible to get to the pages using different routes? http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina and http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/floral-designs/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina would appear to be the same.
There's no canonical tag so actually I'd have a think about my site structure in general (appreciate it can be hard with ecommerce sites). Here's an interesting YouMOZ post - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-effect-of-site-structure-on-organic-traffic-add-categories-ampamp-products.
Also, from a conversion point of view I may make a link to my top level categories of products accessible from all pages.
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
-
Changing URL structure of site, including AMP - redirect AMP too?
So, I'm changing all the URLs of a site, including all its AMP URLs, I'll be redirecting all the normal URLs, but do I need to also redirect all the AMP pages?
Technical SEO | | alksfjasldfu934341 -
How do I best optimize my on-page SEO for a magazine-style wordpress theme?
My Wordpress website is set up with a magazine style theme (Newspaper). Maybe that's the issue overall here. Questions: 1) Pages vs Categories vs Posts I currently have a category with a few dozen posts under it. The category page itself has a ~1000 word article on it. It paginates every 10 posts or so at the bottom, but most of the page is duplicate because it's only swapping out a few links. Should I instead make the "category" a page with the posts childed under it? What's the best way to go about that? 2) Canonical and Pagination I get errors about a ton of duplicate content for paginated categories and my author page (all posts are under the admin account, which has ~40 pages or so. Every page is just a list of posts and it bitches about duplicate Titles and Descriptions on every one of the paginated posts). Should I canonical these back to the root author? Same question regarding pagination for categories, assuming I'm not going to be switching them to Pages. 3) Home Page Links Right now my home page just shows a few links to the top posts of all time. After that, it shows the 5 newest posts. On the sidebar it lists a few random pages/posts. There are also a few "category listings" which just shows random posts relevant to that category. Do I want something more static/structured? The navbar does list most main content pages under their appropriate category, but the home page itself is pretty much dynamic.
Technical SEO | | searchspot0 -
Youtube SEO Best Practices
Does anyone know where to find a list of SEO best practices for Youtube? Specifically...does anyone have thoughts on the SEO benefits of an @domain.com login vs @gmail.com login? Or is adding my url to the "Associated website" channel setting sufficient for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | brianvest0 -
What directory should a site go in (url structure)?
Hi All, The is the first actual SEO campaign i've worked on and I had a few question about where the site should live on the server and url structure. The site is in WP and we're using Yoast SEO. Anyway the site lives in a a folder called Coastal, which is a child of the WWW folder. So the permalink of the homepage is mcoastalwindows.com/coastal/. The URL is mycoastalwindows.com. The thing is I can still get to the homepage or any of the pages on the site by typing in the /coastal/. Another example is permalink mycoastalwndows.com/coastal/siding/ and url mycoastalwindows.com/siding/. The urls always display without the /coastal/, so I'm not too worried about people linking to them, but Yoast puts a canonical element to the permalink and always includes the /coastal/. Also I'm seeing that Google displays a lot of the urls with the /coastal/, which is an issue seeing as we don't link to the pages that way. My original thought was to solve this at the source and just move everything out of the coastal directory, but the developer swears that it's more secure being in another folder especially with WP. What would you all do and what is best practice? Would you move everything out of the coastal folder, 301 re-direct, do something with. htaccess, or another solution? Appreciate the input thanks!
Technical SEO | | Mario.Souza0 -
Removing images from site and Image Sitemap SEO advice
Hello again, I have received an update request where they want me to remove images from this site (as of now its a bunch of thumbnails) current page design: http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/car-wraps/ and turn it into a new design which utilized a slider (such as this): http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/ They don't want the thumbnails on the page anymore. My question is since my site has a image sitemap that has been indexed will removing all the images hurt my SEO greatly? What would the recommended steps to take to reduce any SEO damage be, if so? Thank you again for your help, always great and very helpful feedback! 🙂 cheers!
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
Mobile SEO for mobile site
Hey there! I own a desktop website and just now finishe building a mobile site ( not a responsive design one) and I wish to start ranking my site on mobile serch result page. due to the automatic redirection from desktop website to the mobile site im confused: where should link to in order to SEO my mobile site? should i link to domin.com and assume the link juice is passing on? or should i link to m.domim.com?
Technical SEO | | logophone0 -
Multiple Sites Duplicate Content Best Practice
Hi there, I have one client (atlantawidgets.com) who has a main site. But also has duplicate sites with different urls targeting specific geo areas. I.e. (widgetmakersinmarietta.com) Would it be best to go ahead and create a static home page at these add'l sites and make the rest of the site be nonindexed? Or should I go in and allow more pages to be indexed and change the content? If so how many, 3, 5, 8? I don't have tons of time at this point. 3)If I change content within the duplicate sites, what % do I need to change. Does switching the order of the sentences of the content count? Or does it need to be 100%fresh? Thanks everyone.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Best META Fields to Include on New Site
I am in the process of transitioning sites to a Drupal CMS and am curious to know what META information to provide on each of the new site pages. Currently, this is the set-up I plan on using: My questions to the community are: whether or not I've added all pertinent information, and if there's anything I'm overlooking
Technical SEO | | NiallSmith0