Best Site navigation solution
-
Hi there,
We are getting our website redesigned and would like to know whether to increase the links on our site wide navigation or not.
At the moment we have around 30 links from the navigation. We want to use exploding navigation menu and increase the links to our most important categories. Say if we increase to 60-70 would that be alright. (what will be the highest we can go for)
At the moment categories that get links from navigation are ranking pretty good. If we increase would we loose those rankings.
What will be the pros and cons of increasing navigation links?
Second question we are also adding fooer links to top 10 categories in the footer. Would this be ok as far as seo and google concerned.
Many Thanks
-
The link limit is 100 suggested by matt cutts.
No it's not
The 100 link limit suggestion was removed a while ago, though it's is indeed best not to go wild with it.
But the more pages that you link from your home page and back to your home pge the better the home page will rank.
This isn't really true either. If that were the case I could just make a site with 1,000,000 pages all linking back to the homepage and expect to rank. Whereas actually the only way I'll get value to flow back up to the homepage is to attract links to these 1,000,000 pages from external sites.
-
The link limit is 100 suggested by matt cutts.
But the more pages that you link from your home page and back to your home pge the better the home page will rank.
if yo havemnt already ready this article and play with the calculator -
The more link on a page the less value each one carries. For a visualisation check out the images here.
So going from 30 to 80 is obviously going to devalue the authority of each link, however it should mean there are less 'clicks' the bots have to go through to get to all your pages so may increase the number of pages indexed.
Navigation links are (apparently) often recognised by Google Bot anyway, and the links from them are treated differently to links within content.
If it's going to be a better user experience by having these links then I'd definitely go for it as I don't think it will have a big negative impact (I have sites with over 100 nav links and it gets crawled fine and ranks well).
As for the footer links, traditionally links in footers haven't carried much value (having been spammed in theme marketing) but again it should be fine to have.
You could also start coding your page with HTML tags using things like nav and footer, as I anticipate that links and content in these new section types will eventually have SEO implications a little down the line.
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
-
Do Wordpress sites outrank SquareSpace?
I was a big fan of Wordpress. I used it for 10 years. However, because I run a very small business, the constant upkeep needed on WP in the end started to frustrate me in the end, so I moved to SquareSpace. However, I am beginning to question my decision, as one of my sites is struggling really badly, and I mean badly. The other sites are okay. So I started asking around, and most people are saying there shouldn't be a difference. A few people have said their Wordpress sites always outranks their SquareSpace sites. Then I read what Rand Fishkin said in the below Twitter thread, now I am even more confused. I am very reluctant to move to Wordpress, its just so much hassle. But at the same time, if a site doesn't get much traffic then it's useless. https://twitter.com/drew_pickard/status/991659074134556673 https://twitter.com/randfish/status/991974456477278209 Please let me know your thoughts and experience.
Web Design | | RyanUK0 -
What is the best way to employ log-in to benefit in SEO?
Hi all, All SaaS companies have this log-in page as their top visited page in their websites and some times it helps and also hurts them. I've gone through some big SaaS companies websites and they handle the log-in page differently like on sub domain, on website page, some will directly link to their instance login without a page, etc...I wonder what is the best practice to host the log-in to make sure the more visits to log-in page don't hurt us but give us some boost. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Multiple Similar Product Variations - Page layout, Title and SEO best practice??
Im doing some research into SEO for our new web design. I sell designer eyewear prescription and sunglasses. Lets take a Ray Ban Wayfarer sunglass it comes in 30 colours and 3 sizes for each model. Up till now i was of the impression that for best practice SEO i would need to have each individual variation as its own page, this would also help with things like google shopping too. So for example heres 1 colour product in 3 sizes of 30 colour variations for this particular model. Ray Ban Wayfarer RB2140
Web Design | | Craigboi1987
Colour: Black 901
Sizes: 47, 50, 54 Currently my urls looks like this with a new page and the size changing on the end for each variation. Ray Ban Wayfarer RB2140 - Black 901 - 47 URL: www.mywebsite.com/ray-ban-wayfarer-rb2140.html?colour=Black+901&size=47 Ray Ban Wayfarer RB2140 - Black 901 - 50 URL: www.mywebsite.com/ray-ban-wayfarer-rb2140.html?colour=Black+901&size=50 Ray Ban Wayfarer RB2140 - Black 901 - 54 URL: www.mywebsite.com/ray-ban-wayfarer-rb2140.html?colour=Black+901&size=54 This is very time consuming and I'm not sure if its adding any benefit to my SEO in fact scared its actually a) slowing my site down (content heavy)
b) looking like duplicate content I am thinking about moving towards a page more like this were it would be just be a model with variations. (not effecting the title/getting a new page per variation) http://demoleotheme.com/vigoss/index.php/atomic-endurance-running-tee-crew-neck.html I am not sure of the pros and cons of doing it this way over the way I'm doing it currently all i know is my site is ranking horribly. Lastly I'm currently running a magento V1.9 store which is renowned for duplicate content slow site speeds etc so have been told moving to woo commerce would benefit me for both site performance and seo but I'm skeptical as currently with this structure of a each SKU being a new page il be up to 8000+ products and multiple product variations that it can handle my needs, anyone with any experience on woo commerce platform? (this might be a operate question apologise) This is absolutely frying my brain so any advice appreciated. Im prepared to put every dying second into just need some solid advice in which direction to go!0 -
Large Global Site Structure
Hi, I have a question about the advised structure for a website that I'm currently building. It's a large international brand with it's main office in the UK. The main website is the .com but there is a growing international franchisee network. I've built the .com site on Wordpress but I'm not sure if I the best way forward would be to create each international website on a separate hosted site or just include it in the .com Wordpress structure using the The WordPress Multilingual Plugin. So to sum up... should I build the entire global network on one domain and then use WPML plugin or should I build separate websites for each International franchisee? Hope some one can educate me on the best route to take. Thanks Moz Community
Web Design | | SeoSheikh0 -
SEO Audit for site redesign
I'm in the process of preparing my company's ecommerce site for a redesign - largely to move to a responsive design and improve issues with UI and some much-needed features. This is a very small ecommerce business (Less than $300K annually), and we have settled on Magento Community Edition for our platform. We understand it to be very "SEO" friendly, and its similar to our current platform - it gives us a lot of flexibility in design, and it appears scalable. While I am aware of our current sites shortcomings (from an SEO standpoint), I was wondering if I should employ an SEO person/company to do a pre/post redesign audit. I looked at the MOZ checklist, and ran my site through Hubspot and WooRanks free tools, and am aware of what they are reporting as SEO items to be fixed. As I am so small, I was wondering if an SEO audit in addition to what I already know might be overkill? Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome.
Web Design | | Artfx1 -
Best Forum Platform from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I am looking to start a eCommerce business and would like to centre the user engagement of the site around a forum. Can anyone suggest a forum platform that adopts good SEO practice? So far my considerations are; phpBB vBulletin Wordpress with bbPress plugin Wordpress with Tal.ki plugin Anyone used these with great success? Do you have another suggestion? I am simply in the preliminary stage of sourcing something and am eager to here your thoughts... Thanks in advance... Dan
Web Design | | djlaidler0 -
Mobile Web Sites
Hi I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well. On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site. I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of m.theirdomain.com which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud. Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of businessname.ourdomain.com ? Many Thanks
Web Design | | ocelot0 -
How long does Google take to re-cache a site?
Specifically, I just redesigned my site. I'm reading Danny Dovers book, and learned about checking the cache version of the site to see what google is REALLY seeing . . . . . . which evidently is my old site. Obviously, my sites not going to make any real progress with SEO as long as the site is out of date. It says it last checked the site on 5/5 and I launched the site on 5/9. Obviously, it does not do these things immediately, but anyone have any ideas on how long it should take before google starts to show me some love?
Web Design | | damon12120