Solutions for too many on-page links?
-
We have just begun using SEO Moz a few months ago and have been busy cleaning up some of our warnings and errors. One of the errors that has been an issue is ... too many on-page links. I am trying to correct this issue and I am wondering how seo moz counts these links. For instance... we have links to many of our product categories in a drop down from our main menu, those same links are listed in our footer. Does this get counted as two or only one link. If two, should we make one of the link no follow or how would you best suggest correcting this. Our website is www.unikeyhealth.com
Since the menu and the footer appear on virtually every page on our site correcting this issue will quickly sort out this problem. Thanks for any advice.
-
Thanks Takeshi, you make some valid points. Makes sense to me.
-
The PageRank of a page is split between every link on a page. That means that every link on a page lowers the value of every other link on the page (from an SEO perspective). Having more links also makes it more difficult for Google to crawl your site.
The general recommendation is 100 links per page. I counted 177 on your site. 100 is not a hard rule, but generally you want to keep that number fairly low.
When counting links, every "a href" is counted as a separate link, regardless if the destination is the same page. So having the same link in the footer and header counts as 2 links. Nofollowing your links will not do anything to solve this problem, only physically removing your links will.
Now, having a lot of links is not the end of the world, but the question you want to ask is whether having all those links is actually helping your users. I would invest in a user tracking tool such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale, and see how people are actually using your site.
Do people really select "Osteo-Key" from your massive drop-down menu? Maybe the better experience would be to just present the top-level categories, so that people aren't overwhelmed by all the options. How many people actually click the 40+ links you have in your footer? If it's a small amount, then removing them is probably a better user experience and will help SEO as well. Also, having 200 links on a product page is overkill.
From a conversion optimization standpoint, presenting the users with as few options as possible while giving them the capability to find anything they're looking for results in the least confusion and the most conversions. Usable web design lies in finding that balance.
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
-
Canconical tag on site with multiple URL links but only one set of pages
We have a site www.mezfloor.com which has a number of Url's pointing at one site. As the url's have been in use for many years there are links from many sources include good old fashioned hard copy advertising. We have now decided that it would be better to try to start porting all sources to the .co.uk version and get that listing as the prime/master site. A couple of days ago I went through and used canonical tags on all the pages thinking that would set the priority and that would also strengthen the page in terms of trust due to the reduced duplication. However when I went to scan the site in MOZ the warning that the page redirects came up and I am beginning to think that I need to remove all these canonical tags so that search engines do not get into a confused spiral where we loose the little page rank we have. Is there a way that I can redirect everything except the target URL without setting up a separate master site just for all the other pages to point at.
Technical SEO | | Eff-Commerce0 -
Effect of 302 redirects from empty parent page to sub page
A client's website has links to their service pages which then redirect (302 through a php "Location:" header) to that service's first sub-page. For example, our-services/service-x redirects to our-services/service-x/about-service-x I can only think this has been done because there is no actual content for the parent page and to maintain some kind of structure for navigation and URLs. Really there's no reason why the 'about-service-x' page can't be removed and its content transferred to the main 'service-x' page. Then the redirects can be removed also - it's not how a 302 should be used for a start. I'm just wondering what kind of effect this current redirection has on SEO, as I know 302s don't pass any link juice? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | driftingbass0 -
Link juice and max number of links clarification
I understand roughly that "Link Juice" is passed by dividing PR by the number of links on a page. I also understand the juice available is reduced by some portion on each iteration. 50 PR page 10 links on page 5 * .9 = 4.5 PR goes to each link. Correct? If so and knowing Google stops counting links somewhere around 100, how would it impact the flow to have over 100 links? IE 50 PR page 150 links on the page .33 *.9 = .29PR to each link BUT only for 100 of them. After that, the juice is just lost? Also, I assume Google, to the best of its ability, organizes the links in order of importance such that content links are counted before footer links etc.
Technical SEO | | sprynewmedia0 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Translating Page Titles & Page Descriptions
I am working on a site that will be published in the original English, with localized versions in French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. All the versions will use the English information architecture. As part of the process, we will be translating the page the titles and page descriptions. Translation quality will be outstanding. The client is a translation company. Each version will get at least four pairs of eyes including expert translators, editors, QA experts and proofreaders. My question is what special SEO instructions should be issued to translators re: the page titles and page descriptions. (We have to presume the translators know nothing about SEO.) I was thinking of: stick to the character counts for titles and descriptions make sure the title and description work together avoid over repetition of keywords page titles (over-optimization peril) think of the descriptions as marketing copy try to repeat some title phrases in the description (to get the bolding and promote click though) That's the micro stuff. The macro stuff: We haven't done extensive keyword research for the other languages. Most of the clients are in the US. The other language versions are more a demo of translation ability than looking for clients elsewhere. Are we missing something big here?
Technical SEO | | DanielFreedman0 -
Noindex,follow - linked pages not showing
We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow". Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator. Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be... Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
New Domain Page 7 Google but Page 1 Bing & Yahoo
Hi just wondered what other people's experience is with a new domain. Basically have a client with a domain registered end of May this year, so less than 3 months old! The site ranks for his keyword choice (not very competitive), which is in the domain name. For me I'm not at all surprised with Google's low ranking after such a short period but quite surprsied to see it ranking page 1 on Bing and Yahoo. No seo work has been done yet and there are no inbound links. Anyone else have experience of this? Should I be surprised or is that normal in the other two search engines? Thanks in advance Trevor
Technical SEO | | TrevorJones0
