Best On-Site Internal Linking Practices?
-
Hi everyone,
Our company works extensively with ecommerce website, and we're beginning to wonder with all of the impending Google updates what our best bets for internal linking practices will be, in particular when it comes to menu options. We typically set up our navigation with top-level categories in the main menu, then drop downs to the sub-category level pages. Our question is, should the links in the drop-down menus be followed, and if so, should they be followed links across all pages of the website, or just on the homepage menu list, or not at all?
We're trying to figure out what will pass the most internal linking power without being too much and overly "spammy," I guess.
Thanks for your input!
-
Thanks so much for the input, everyone. Really appreciate all of your opinions. We'll do some experimenting with the navigation layout as per your recommendations and see how we can make it work for us!
Thanks again, guys!
-
Takeshi is right, James- you gain nothing by adding nofollow to internal links. In addition, if you attract attention with a lot of it, you could even incur a penalty. Matt Cutts has stated more than once that nofollowing internal links isn't advisable, except perhaps in limited special circumstances, such as to a contact form or privacy policy. If you get carried away with internal nofollow, it could look like you're trying to sculpt pagerank, and that could cause you problems you don't want to have.
-
Again, you don't want to nofollow your internal links. Nofollowing your links has no positive impact, and just prevents any link value from flowing to your internal pages.
If you have a particularly large category structure, one thing you may want to try is limiting the links in your drop-downs to the top subcategories. Even if you have 10 different menus with 20 different subcategories each, chances are 80% of your users are only selecting 20% of the links (or less). Install a site tracker such as CrazyEgg or Clciktale to figure out which links your users actually use, and eliminate the ones that don't get many clicks.
So your navigation would look something like this:
Automobiles
Tires
Oil
Batteries
Accessories
More Auto Products -
Have you tried turning the drop down off and running a test to see how your goals compare? Or even if just the pages / visit etc.. drop.
-
We do have that implemented on some sites...but for others, we prefer the drop-down feature for easier navigation on the user end. So when a user hovers over the top-level category, the sub-category options appear below it, so less clicking through to a number of different pages - users can go straight to the sub-category they're looking for straight from the homepage. I guess these are really the links we're curious about - the sub-category links in the drop-down menus...to follow or not to follow?
Thanks for all of your input so far - much appreciated!!
-
Having just the top level categories in the main menu like you said is a good option. No need to overload the users with too many choices. Then once the user is in a specific category, the sidebar nav can show navigation links for subcategories.
-
The only issue I think we would run into with this is that some of our catalogs get rather large, and we don't want to have too MANY on-page links. We know that having no-follow links won't cause more link power to flow to other links, but we're wondering what would be the best, most efficient, most powerful way to handle a large catalog without overloading the links on each page...
-
Ooops, I'd done this on my own site.
We had a menu linking to all pages on every page. I tried limiting this but the design of the site put some limitations on me, so I implemented rel=nofollow on some internal pages....
I think now I'll go remove them.....
-
Nofollowing a link does not cause more link power to flow to your other links, it just causes that link juice that would have gone to that page to "evaporate", resulting in a loss of link equity. In general, you NEVER want to nofollow your own pages.
As far as internal linking for ecommerce sites goes, I generally look to amazon.com & overstock.com for good site architecture and good ecommerce SEO in general.
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
-
Disavow links from legit sites but have spammy link profiles?
I'm currently doing a backlink audit for our site with a LOT of backlinks. Some of the linking sites are legitimate business websites in our industry who have linked to us for a totally legitimate reason (we have good content!). However, these businesses themselves have a spammy backlink profile—that is, the only sites linking to that site are obvious link farm sites. Here is an illustration: spammyseolinks.com; payforseo.xyz; blackhat.ru ==all link to==> legitbusiness.com ==links to==> mysite.com Should I disavow this backlink? I guess it's not really giving me much SEO worth since it surely been branded a spammy junk domain, but then again, it's a real website that we've earned a link from because we're doing stuff the right way. Is it hurting or helping me?
Link Building | | THandorf0 -
What are Best Practices for Ault Site SEO
Has anyone here had experience doing SEO for an Adult DVD website? A company has approached me and they obviously only want White Hat practices. I have used open site explorer to do research on some competitors. The top competitors of this company seem to have only a few high PR links from High Authority industry sites and almost all have a link from the Yahoo Directory. Does anyone know where or how to create high authority content links from this niche? It seems that most of the competitor links are on sub par pages and are single links in the side nav of other sites. I am not sure if I can post a link to the company here but any suggestions on link building for adult sites would be great. Please remember they are a retailer and don't have pop up advertising or any illegal content. Thanks,
Link Building | | macs220 -
Creating your own blog for back linking to your site
Our competitor seems to be linked to a blog that they have created themselves. From an SEO perspective is it worthwhile creating a blog that is related to your particular industry and then only including links back to your site. Also is there any way to upload ,articles etc automatically to the blog to cut down on the people hours involved in updating content?
Link Building | | Hardley10 -
LInk Building Ideas for Large Site
Hi, I have a very large sized website of about 5 Million Pages. Earlier i used to rank very well with many naturally occurred links, But now, i lost my rankings with numerous Google updates. My content is user generated content and it wont be pure original as my users will post the same on other forums too. I all of my pages rank on #1 page for their keywords. Can anyone suggest me good link building strategy for larger websites as each url will have different keyword, i want all of my urls to be ranked well. Waiting for your replies.
Link Building | | Vegitss0 -
Brand new website, should I nofollow almost all internal links?
Hi, As I am creating a completely new website for my employer (she will have zero incoming links, even the URL will be different), would it be advantageous to allow follows to the other internal pages from the home page, but disallow follows on all other internal links on each subsequent page? So, for example each page will have this many internal links: Home page: 5 (all 5 service pages) Recruiting: 1 (home link) Services: 1 (home link) Talent Assessment: 1 (home link) etc. Does this make sense to bolster the home page until we can get some links coming in?
Link Building | | wlw20090 -
Potential internal links issue
From the competitive domain analysis, it looks like our site only has 1 internal link because there is only one more “total link” than “total external links”. However, I am quite sure that we have many more internal links on our site, including breadcrumbs throughout the product pages. What am I missing here? One other piece of potentially relevant information is that our URL changed about 6 weeks ago. Would this change be impacting the number of internal links that we are getting credit for on our site?
Link Building | | dentalsupply-seo0 -
How do you check to see if your site (site A) has already been linked to by another site (site B) when you have a large site with lots of links
There are some basics in SEO relating to finding out about who has linked to whom that I could use some help with.
Link Building | | hughman0 -
What is the best way to seek out good incoming links?
I get "form letter" type requests for links all the time from companies whose product has absolutely no relationship to mine. I always decline them. But I really want to build up link juice, and I'm wondering how to begin. Is the "form letter" all right to send or should it be more personal? I sell tablecloths; I assume I should go to home decor companies? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | go4linens0