Primary Navigation: Keep All Links Or Keep Top Level
-
Our eCommerce site www.towelsrus.co.uk employees a primary navigation system which we can enable to as many categories or not as we link. If all categories are enabled it adds roughly another 50 to 60 followed links per page giving all pages roughly 150 followed links (Google suggests no more than 100 per page). If I enable just top level navigation then this reduces them all considerably.
Personally from the customer experience I think its better for them all to be visible, however from an SEO perspective and link juice perhaps not.
Thought and opinions much appreciated here.
Thanks
Craig
-
Hi,
Thanks for the video, a novelty to say the least. Again I think your response just further justifies the changes i am going to make to the primary nav.
Thanks again.
Regards
Craig
-
Hi Lucas,
Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Really appreciated.
In response to the URL structure, this is auto generated by the website, we do not have any control over the URL at all other than it taking the category or product name into account. Unfortunate as it would be nice to have shorter URL's across the site.
Any way, thanks again
-
Hey Craig,
Great Question. I have made a video response for you.
In Summary
The number of links per page used to matter a whole lot more a couple of years ago when Google wasn't as advanced as it now is. However, it is able to crawl much more deeply and quickly without the same constraints. With this in mind I would recommend that you put on as many links as is necessary for the customer or user to reach their desired goal. Don't worry about link juice or search engines being unable to read the full page. This is very much a thing of the past.
Hope this helps
-
My personal opinion here is that user experience is priority #1. Google wants sites to be user friendly before it wants you to optimize it, so that said - I would recommend that you maintain the category navigation in the menu. If you look at various ecommerce websites across the internet, Amazon.com - is one of many, many sites that do the same navigation style as yourself. I think that you're just fine and to continue. It's a great looking website.
Although, looking further, I wonder why your navigation style is like this? http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/bathrobes/catlist_fnct362.htm
Is it just an unchangeable facet of your Ecommerce platform? http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/bathrobes/ or http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/cat362/bathrobes/ or http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/362/bathrobes/ would be a little cleaner. Anyway - my personal opinion. Hope this helps.
Best,
Lucas
PS. Matt has a good blog post for you: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
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
-
Breadcrumbs or contextual links ?
Hi, I have breadcrumbs on my site but wondering if in addition to those I should also add contextual links linking to the same pages ? Or is it necessary to duplicate ? The reason i would be doing this is because contextual links/ editorial is what google likes and I am not sure breadcrumbs counts as much. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Contextual links (is this screen shot considered contextual /editorial links ?)
Hello, Is the screen shot below considered contextual ?https://imgur.com/a/mrbQq and does it have any value or no value What is the value on a scale from 0 to 10 (if you know) of a contextual link versus non contextual links. Thank you, mrbQq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Re: Inbound Links. Whether it's HTTP or HTTPS, does it still go towards the same inbound link count?
Re: Inbound Links. If another website links to my website, does it make a difference to my inbound link count if they use http or https? Basically, my site http://mysite.com redirects to https://mysite.com, so if another website uses the link http://mysite.com, will https://mysite.com still benefit from the inbound links count? I'm unsure if I should reach out to all my inbound links to tell them to use my https URL instead...which would be rather time consuming so just checking http and https counts all the same. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | premieresales0 -
What Links to Disavow?
I am looking through my website's link profile that I pulled directly from Google Webmaster Tools. What is the best way to determine the links to disavow? Maybe the Webmaster Tools list is not the best list for this process but I really need to clean up the links that are hurting the site's SEO. Does anyone have any insight?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PartyStore0 -
Spam Links? -115 Domains Sharing the Same IP Address, to Remove or Not Remove Links
Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address. Examples of these directories are: -www.keydirectory.net -www.linkwind.com -www.sitepassage.com -www.ubdaily.com -www.linkyard.org A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links. My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality. I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS. Thanks everyone!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How should I handle these links?
I recently purchased a site which is in the same niche as my personal blog. MANY of the keywords which I want both sites to rank for, they are already ranking well for (Eg I rank #1 with one site and #5 for the other). I haven't started linking the two sites to each other yet (waiting to announce the acquisition before I do). I have 2 questions for you all... How powerful do you think linking between these sites could be? How do you think I should handle the linking between these two sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Why traffic to my link has dropped suddenly?
Hi I would like to know why the traffic for the website link http://theindustrymeasure.com/2010/07/15/rediffmail-login has dropped suddenly on google.I used to get around 5000 page views on this page and then suddenly dropped to 15-20 . I still get good traffic from yahoo (around 500). Just before the drop I noticed that I started to get spammy trackbacks from Many questionable sources. I have not approved any of these trackbacks. The trackbacks are regular frequency of. 1 per day. is there any action which I can take to ensure that I get back my traffic. Traffic to other links are fine , only this page seems to have dropped off ever since the spam attack. As per seomoz tool I have a grade a for keyword rediffmail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShoutOut0 -
Navigation
I've been wrestling with this one for a while. Take a standard small web site navigation with nav links for: Products Solutions Support Learning Center I believe having drop downs to show the sub-pages of each category provides a better user experience, but it also bloats my links per page in the navigation from 4 to 24. Most of the additional links are useful for user experience, but not search purposes. So, 2-years after Google's changing of how it treats nofollows (which used to be the easy answer to this question), what is considered best practice? A) Go ahead and add the full 24 nav links on each page. The user experience outweighs the SEO benefits of fewer links and Google doesn't worry too much about nav links relative to main body links. B) Stick to only 4 nav options. Having 20 additional links on every page is a big deal and removing them is worth the user experience hit. I can still get to all levels of this small site within 2-3 clicks and do cross category linking to mitigate silos. C) Use some technical voodoo with js links or iframes to hide the nav links from Google and get the best of both worlds. D) Do something that is not one of the first three choices. Does anyone feel strongly about any of the above options or is this a user-preference type of situation where it doesn't make much difference which option you choose on a small 100-200 page site? I'm really looking forward to everyone's thoughts on this. -DV
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dvansant0