I have a client where every page has over 100 links
-
Some links are in the main navigation (it has a secondary and tertiary level) and some links are repeated in the left navigation. Every page has over 100 links if crawled.
From a practical standpoint, would you (a) delete the 3rd-level links (or at least argue for that) or (b) rel='nofollow' them? From a usability standpoint, this setup works as they are almost one click from everything. From a crawl standpoint, I see some pages missed in google (the sitemap has over 200 links).
Looking for the best on-page current SEO advice to set these guys on the road to success.
-
The site isn't low quality (there are no ads and they don't sell anything -- it is a scientific site) -- it's just that EVERY link is available as a secondary or tertiary link. My initial thought is to simply get rid of the tertiary level within the main nav, cutting out roughly half of the links. On any inside page, they are available on a left-side nav anyway. The smallest number of links is about 110, the largest is pushing 250. I just wondered about everyone's opinion.
Rendering the menu via jQuery as Chad suggests might help. This is a wordpress-based site so I'll have to really look into it as they have to edit it too.
We've already begun mapping out clicks as goals (conversions) within GA.
-
If the site has good authority/PR I wouldnt worry about it although I would look at in-page analytics to see whether people actually click the links. If its setup like this to pass link juice the above is more applicable, if not look at whether people are actually clicking the links and if they arent id suggest an alternative navigation.
-
First off, never use rel='nofollow' to your own site.
Personally, I would trim up the left menu if you can, or find an easier / creative JavaScript-driven way to present the data. The 100 links thing isn't a law written in stone. SEOmoz's tools do yell about it if you go over 100 links. This "100 link lore" comes from a Matt Cutts blog post:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
If you look close, you may notice that there are more than 100 links even on the page that Matt wrote about this. It's kind of a loose guideline in my eyes. From my own professional experience, if every page on your site has 500 links, you're going to hurt for it. But if you have 125 links on quite a few pages, or put out a blog post that's just an insane resource that links to a few hundred people, you'll still be just fine.
I'd think about it as just one more signal of a potentially abusive or low quality site. If your site isn't under heavy scrutiny for other reasons, and you don't go totally nuts with links, you'll probably be just fine, but there is a lot of wisdom in Matt Cutt's post all the same. Eliminate the unnecessary and things will work better, in and out of Google.
-
Use jQuery- it will basically solve all your to many links on a page.
Chad
-
nofollow is not a good idea if you have a good pagerank I wouldn't worry about it. But remove duplicates first..
-
We had a similar issue with one site -- a footer with a ton of links to all parts of the site, duplicated on every page. The feeling was that it flattened out the site's link structure too much, so we changed it so that the footer was loaded via ajax on page load.
In that case, I don't think it made much difference performance-wise so I can't say for certain if it will help you. But, it is a way to clean up your link structure.
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
-
Duplicate Page Titles
It seems as though we are being flagged for duplicate page titles when really they are slightly different. Is it better to remove the "dart board" or "dart board backboard" from all the product titles? We were doing this for optimal SEO - to rank for the search of "dart board" - but is it really hurting us? for example, our product titles are: Obama dart board backboard, Texas dart board backboard, Oklahoma dart board backboard, etc. Yet they are being flagged as duplicate titles.
On-Page Optimization | | DartsDecor0 -
Duplicate Page Content
Hi, I am new to the MOZ Pro community. I got the below message for many of my pages. We have a video site so all content in the page except the video link would be different. How can i handle such pages. Can we place adsense AD's on these pages? Duplicate Page Content Code and content on this page looks similar or identical to code and content on other pages on your site. Search engines may not know which pages are best to include in their index and rankings. Common fixes for this issue include 301 redirects, using the rel=canonical tag, and using the Parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Central. For more information on duplicate content, visit http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content. Please help me to know how to handle this.. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Nettv0 -
Do javascript pseudo-links dilute link juice ?
Hi, On our ecommerce, we use multiple pseudo-links for the layered navigation (to filter by color, site, etc), so that google doesn't crawl every combination of filters. I know this kind of links don't pass link juice and don't get crawled (provided you hide the target urls in your javascript). But, as there is an "onclick" property, I'm afraid that google could understand that these are links, and treat them the same way as nofollowed links (not following them but diluting link juice anyway). Do you know if this is the case ? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Strelok0 -
Link Structure
On my site I have a dropdown menu going across the page at the top to all of my categories on each page, I also have a similar structure going down the side going to the same categories, is this acceptable or would Google count this as double the internal links?
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Navigation Links Causing Too Many Links Help?
Hello, I have read some SEOMOZ search results for this, but am still concerned that Google may see 4,500 Too Many Link warnings as a problem. This is caused primarily due to our header navigation, which is not intended to be keyword stuffing, but to provide all avenues for our breadth of content. site: crazymikesapps.com. Most answers seem to advise if there is no keyword stuffing at hand don't worry about it. Any help appreciated. thank you Mike
On-Page Optimization | | crazymikesapps0 -
Why does the on page report reports a full path link as Cannibalize link?
On the seomoz on page report i get a cannibalize error. This is due to a link being full path. When i change the link to relative path then there is no Cannibalize error. Should i change the internal links of the site to relative path? I would appreciate your help.
On-Page Optimization | | pickaweb0 -
How to fix duplicate page content and page titles?
Apologies in advance if this has already been answered (it probably has) - I'm just not seeing it. Is there a guide on here for how to fix the issues brought up by the crawler - specifically, things like duplicate page content, or duplicate page titles? A lot of these seem to have been created by wordpress.org combos that I didn't anticipate - i.e., category pages, author pages, etc. The crawler brings up the problems, but I don' t know where to start to go about fixing them. Also, any guide on best SEO practices or fixing optimization problems, specifically for wordpress.org blogs, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | prospects1 -
What do you do with old web pages?
I have a wordpress blog that I've made a ton of changes to. I have about a dozen pages on it that have old information or I no longer have a use for. In retrospect, I probably should have used the old pages for new content instead of building new pages. Should I just leave them on the site with no links to them, should I mark them as noindex, or should I delete them? I think some of the old pages could be completing with my new pages for ranking due to similar content. Website is: http://continuumweddings.com if you'd like to check out my site. Thanks, Melissa
On-Page Optimization | | mrsmelmitch0