"Too Many On-Page Links" Issue
-
I'm being docked for too many on page links on every page on the site, and I believe it is because the drop down nav has about 130 links in it. It's because we have a few levels of dropdowns, so you can get to any page from the main page. The site is here - http://www.ibethel.org/
Is what I'm doing just a bad practice and the dropdowns shouldn't give as much information? Or is there something different I should do with the links? Maybe a no-follow on the last tier of dropdown?
-
Marcus and Alan offered some very good advice.
I've visited your website before and had a good user experience.
I'd only add two suggestions.
The Itineraries Tab could be a one-click to the Itineraries landing page. It is easy to locate individual names in the Left Nav and main events/conferences on the page.
Get Google Page Speed for Firefox. Love the wealth of information and fixes it offers. I like to copy and paste the page results into Notepad. You can see scores for each issue--helps prioritize what to fix first.
HTH
-
Some great stuff there - thumbs up!
-
While having all those links in the main nav site-wide isn't necessarily helpful to SEO, I routinely deal with clients that have twice as many links in their drop-downs. So I agree with Marcus - it shouldn't be causing you serious problems.
In addition to Marcus' suggestion, I would recommend a couple things to work on:
1. Sub-navigation
Like you have in the Staff section http://www.ibethel.org/staff - by adding in sub-navigation (links within that section that appear on each page of that section, and only for those pages) you reinforce content relationships.
2. Referrer Code in URLs - Duplicate Content
You've got links that have their URL appended to track referrer source right on the site. On the home page - the graphic call-out box (large graphic with 3 smaller graphics to the right of it). These links point to internal pages but stick
"?referrer=front_page" on the end. And since your graphics rotate, that means every page linked from this area is generating its own duplicate content conflict. While some programmers say it's fine, it's not. You could mitigate this by pushing canonical tags across the entire site, however best practices dictate to eliminate this referrer tracking method completely - Google only uses canonical tags as a signal and not all search engines use it.
3. Site Speed
I ran a couple site speed tests - you've got some serious issues regarding crawl speed. Your home page images are huge files, and you take a second hit with lots of Javascript file loading times. - More than one check came in at over 13 seconds - that's not user speed - it's crawlability by search bots. I highly recommend looking further into that. If it takes search bots too long to crawl just one single page, some of the links on that page will not be found during any single crawl - and this alone could be part of your problem. Look to have those graphic images compressed without losing quality. Look to have your Javascript files compiled.
4. Store Issues
Your category pages (http://store.ibethel.org/Childrens-Resources/c236/index.html for example) have no paragraph based descriptions so you're missing out on an important way to properly optimize those category pages for SEO.
5. Content Organization
Also in the store - your Books section organization is a bit messed up. So your breadcrumbs are broken. For example on this sub-category page http://store.ibethel.org/Books-Books/c173_25/index.html the breadcrumb shows Store Home > Catalog > Books > Books when it should be Store Home > Books. Except when I go to the top level "Books" link in the breadcrumbs I get an empty page http://store.ibethel.org/Books/c173/index.html
6. Store Page Titles
In the store, when there's more than one page of products in a category, if I click down to the 2nd or 3rd page in that category, I get the same page Title. Every page title should be unique, so the simplest way to fix that is to append page titles with the page number. Like Music then Music | Page 2 then Music | Page 3 and so on.
7. Stronger Titles
Your page titles in the store could be much stronger - Having a page TItle of "Music" isn't going to allow your site to rank extremely well given how competitive that single word is. You'd be better off with titles like:
Christian Music | Online Christian Music Downloads
Or for "Childrens Resources" a better page Title might be:
Christian Parenting | Christian Education Reources
8. Store Home Page Duplicate
Both http://store.ibethel.org/index.html and http://store.ibethel.org/ work - so that's duplicate content - have the index.html version set up with a 301 redirect pointing to the http://store.ibethel.org version.
-
Hey Blairr
Can you explain the problem a little more as I can't really see anything wrong with the site.
In your case, the 130 nav links is not the end of the world as you don't have a massive site (category, sub category, product etc). Also, I have done various searches for your title tag and the name of your church and you have great visibility in those results with a 1st place homepage listing, a google map listing, site links and various other pages so nothing to worry about there.
I also did a search for a snippet of text from one of your deep testimonial pages "but I trust it will be encouraging to all. In March" - what was interesting was that it returned three pages, two of which were from another site called healingherald.org.
So, you may find that these pages are not going to rank so well as this content already exists on another site which is ranking above you for the content.
If you have ranking issues, I would investigate these first and depending on who owns the content either remove these dupe pages from the index or investigate using a canonical URL to the other site (or from the other site to you if it is your content).
Certainly, that is where I would start rather than the navigation as whilst there is a general 100 links a page rule, I would not obsess about that in the overall hierarchy of this site.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
Internal link is creating duplicate content issues and generating 404s from website crawl.
Not sure what the best way to describe it but the site is built with Elementor page builder. We are finding out that a feature that is included with a pop modal window renders an HTML code as so: Click So when crawled I think the crawling is linking itself for some reason so the crawl returns something like this: xyz.com/builder/listing/ - what we want what we don't want xyz.com/builder/listing/ xyz.com/builder/listing/%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9/ xyz.com/builder/listing/%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9//%23elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijc2MCIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9/ so you'll notice how that string in the HREF is appended each time and it loops a couple times. Could I 301 this issue, what's the best way to go about handling something like this? It's causing duplicate meta descriptions/content errors for some listing pages we have. I did add a rel='nofollow' to the anchor tag with JavaScript but not sure if that'll help.
Technical SEO | | JoseG-LP0 -
Too Many Page Links
I have 8 niche websites for golf clubs. This was done to carve out tight niches for specific types of clubs then only broadens each club by type - i.e. better player, game improvement, max game improvement. So far, for fairly young sites, <1 year, they are doing fairly well as I build content. Running campaigns has alerted me to one problem - too many on-page links. And because I use Wordpress those links are on each page in the right sidebar and lead to the other sites. Even though visitors arrive via organic search in most cases they tend to eventually exit to one of the other sites or they click on a product (Ebay) and venture off to hopefully make a purchase. Ex: Drivers site will have a picture link for each of the other 7 sites. Question: If I have one stie (like a splash page) used as one link to that page listing all the sites with a brief explanation of each site will this cause visitors to bounce off because they will have one click, than the list and other clicks depending on what other club/site they would like to go to. The links all open in new windows. This would cut down on the number of links per page of each site but will it cause too much work for visitors and cause them to leave?
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Is it better to have URLs of internal pages that are geo-targeted or point geo-targeted links to the homepage?
For example... Having links that are geo-targeted and pointing to this URL www.test.com/state-service/ or Not having any geo-targeted internal pages and just having links that are geo-targeted and pointing to this URL www.test.com Eventually the site will be a national campaign, so I am concerned about having so many geo-targeted internal pages. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Cyclone0 -
Moz Crawl Reporting Duplicate content on "template" styled pages
We have a lot of detail pages on our site that reference specific scholarships. Each page has a different Title and Description. They also have unique information all regarding the same data points. The pages are displayed in a similar structure to the user so the data is easy to read. My problem is a lot of these pages are being reported as duplicate content when they certainly are not. Most of them are reported as duplicates when they have the same sponsor. They may have the same contact information listed. These two are being reported as duplicate of each other. They share some data but they are definitely different scholarships. http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/adelaide-mcclelland-garden-club-scholarship/9254/ http://www.collegexpress.com/scholarships/mary-wannamaker-witt-and-lee-hampton-witt-memorial-scholarship/10785/ Would it help to add a Canonical for each page to themselves? Any other suggestions would be great. Thanks
Technical SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
Duplicate page content issue needs resolution.
After my last "crawl" report, I received a warning about "duplicate page content". One page was: http://anycompany.com and the other was: http://anycompany.com/home.html How do I correct this so these pages aren't competing with each other or is this a problem?
Technical SEO | | JamesSagerser0 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. My Seomoz report this week tells me that I have about 500 pages with Too Many On-Page Links One of the examples is this one: https://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-9000mfp-refurbished-printer (104 links) If you check, all our products have a RELATED products section and in some of them the related products can be UP to 40 Products. I wonder how can I solve this. I thought that putting nofollow on the links of the related products might fix all of these warnings? Putting NOFOLLOW does not affect SEO?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
How to add "no follow" to feeds
Hey all, I just had a crawl test done on my site(created using wordpress) and I received a ton of missing meta tag descriptions to fix. The odd thing is though I use "All in One" SEO Tool and the actual pages or posts on the site do have meta tag descriptions, however I noticed for every post an RSS Feed is being automatically generated and this Feed is the culprit without meta tag descriptions. I am totally clueless on how to resolve these errors as I havent installed any WP plugins that generate feeds automatically. Has anyone encountered this problem before or know how to fix this?? The site url is http:// GovernmentGrantsAustralia . org I have left spaces above to avoid being a link dropper 🙂 Would really appreciate if anyone can help! Thanks a million, Jus
Technical SEO | | justin990 -
TLD - ".com.br" X ".com" which to use?
Hello I'm starting an SEO work on a site that has the domain "www.dominiodocliente.com" and "www.dominiodocliente.com.br." The problem is that the domain name. ".com" already has a low rank for keywords chosen as the domain "Com.br" has no rank. On the other hand, the domain ". Com" has 224 results in google as the domain "Com.br" has 1970 results. My question is: Which domain should I focus on SEO work? Tks
Technical SEO | | eder.machado0