Ecommerce category navigation structure -best practices

[BobGW]

Hello,

I've heard that there is a specific strategy for the best linkjuice distribution for categorizing an ecommerce site.

How many links should there be on the home pages? Categories 1 deep? 2 deep?

This client's customers don't like to go very deep, and they usually don't find our second page

Thanks!

[RDK]

So in this approach, you're adding additional links rather than limiting the amount of navigational links that are allowed to be followed from the homepage.

I'm one to believe that structure should be based less on link-juice goals and more on what will provide value to the user.You can use a variety of tricks to modify the flow of linkjuice, but I don't know of any tricks that modify the logic people use to find what they're looking for.

[BobGW]

Thanks RDK, very informative.

Could you say more about what this means

The second approach, for smaller sites, is to follow UI guidelines, where the hierarchy is set without regard of category value. Then, tweak your textual links to direct linkjuice to more important categories. Again, just a simple example.<<

[RDK]

Your question can be broken into 3 parts (category depth and linkjuice distribution being closely related):

1. Max links on homepage (or any page for that matter)

It used to be said to keep it under some magical threshold (60, 80, 100, etc.), but I have researched this topic extensively and there are many people who believe the number of links is not important so long as your navigation makes sense. Since 'mega-menu' madness set in a couple years ago, I struggle to see how having 200 links on your homepage can do anything other than dilute the linkjuice and domain specificity. The idea of there being a penalty or that the bottom 'x' links are not crawled doesn't carry much weight these days.

2. Linkjuice distribution strategy

I break my strategies into 2 major approaches with the difference being the method for accomplishing link distribution.

The first approach being large sites with hundreds of categories. In this case, it is better to organize logically and then use robots.txt to control (limit) the amount of internal links pointing to your less important category pages. There are many ways to do this and I'll give you an example of one way to 'automate' it. One mega menu could be used on the homepage that points to your important categories, blocking crawling for the others. A copy of this menu that allows all links to be followed can be used on second and third level categories, so the less important categories can be indexed, yet not carry the weight of a link from the homepage. This is a over-simplified example, but you should be able to extrapolate the gist here.

The second approach, for smaller sites, is to follow UI guidelines, where the hierarchy is set without regard of category value. Then, tweak your textual links to direct linkjuice to more important categories. Again, just a simple example.

3. Category depth

You've already done your research.. users don't like to click through. However, this is the natural state of humanity, so I'd focus less on how deep you ago and concentrate on the 'user experience', where your content has more sensible categorization and more relevant connections between products-categories.  Do you want to be forced into click 7 times to reach the product you're looking for? (of course not)  So, why not make navigating to the 'deeper' products more accessible via technology (menus, parametric filters, etc) or content grouping?