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
-
I am Using <noscript>in All Webpage and google not Crawl my site automatically any solution</noscript>
| |
Web Design | | ahtisham2018
| | <noscript></span></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=errorPages/content-blocked.jsp?reason=js"></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"><span class="html-tag"></noscript> | and Please tell me effect on seo or not1 -
Site Migration due to Corporate Acquisition
Hey everyone, Wanted to check-in on something that I've been thinking way too much about lately. I'll do my best to provide background, but due to some poor planning, it is rather confusing to wrap your head around. There are currently three companies involved, Holding Corp (H Corp) and two operating companies, both in the same vertical but one B2B and the other is B2C. B2C corp has been pushed down the line and we're focusing primarily on H Corp and B2B brand. Due to an acquisition of H Corp and all of it's holdings, things are getting shuffled and Ive been brought in to ensure things are done correctly. What's bizarre is H Corp and it's web property are the dominant authority in SERPs for the B2B brand. As in B2B brand loses on brand searches to H Corp, let alone any product/service related terms. As such, they want to effectively migrate all related content from H Corp site to B2B brand site and handover authority as effectively as possible. Summary: Domain Migration from H Corp site to B2B Brand site. Ive done a few migrations in my past and been brought in to recover a few post-launch so I have decent experience and a trusted process. One of my primary objectives initially is change as little as possible with content, url structure (outside the root) etc so 301s are easy but also so it doesn't look like we're trying to play any games. Here's the thing, the URL structure for H Corp is downright bad from both a UX perspective and a general organizational perspective. So Im feeling conflicted and wanted to get a few other opinions. Here are my two paths as I see and Id love opinions on both: stick with a similar URL structure to H Corp through the migration (my normal process) but deviate from pretty much every best practice for structuring URLs with keywords, common sense and logic. Pro: follow my process (which has always worked in the past) Con: don't implement SEO/On-page best practices at this stage and wait for the site redesign to implement best practices (more work) Implement new URL structure now and deviate from my trusted process. Do you see a third option? Am I overthinking it? Other important details: B2B brand is under-going a site redesign, mostly aesthetic but their a big corporation and will likely take 6-9 months to get up. Any input greatly appreciated. Cheers, Brent
Web Design | | pastcatch1 -
Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.
Web Design | | bizmanuals0 -
My site build in HTML has been badly hit this recent update and I have been toying on the idea of changing it to Wordpress
My site build in HTML has been badly hit this recent update and I have been toying on the idea of changing it to Wordpress. Would this help in my rankings? It seems the hit came only that last 2-4 days when business become much quieter. Frankly i have no idea on why the site fell in ranking all of a sudden. Been comparing to competitors and even a friend in the same industry and nothing makes sense so far (link profile, DA, PA etc) This site has been ranking well for 3 years prior to this. 2. My site has loads of content and visitors arrive from various landpages. But by changing it wordpress, the url of most of them would probably change. What should i do? 301 redirect all of them or is there a better method?
Web Design | | rester0 -
Usual time to index and rank a new site
Hi Just wondering if anyone knew how long it usually takes for a brand new site to get indexed and ranked? I launched a new site about 5 weeks ago. So far I have had 96,000 pages indexed but the majority haven't ranked particularly well or appeared. The ones that have ranked aren't ranking high even though they have better content than competitors sites... And my old domain. Do I just need to hang tight and wait till my domain authority improves? Is there anything I can do to speed up this process? cheers
Web Design | | DavidLenehan0 -
Two sites in same industry and which shopping cart
Right. So I suspect I am going to sound paranoid here - but you'll all forgive me right?? I am sure I saw a reply to a question on the Q&A suggesting that it was a bad idea to have two sites in one industry as Google may see it as trying to get two bites of the SERP cherry... is this accurate? I have an existing asp.net site in the maternity wear industry here in Australia and am wanting to start another site to appeal to a different customer base... the market is quite broad. There will be a core list of products that are the same between the sites, but also some quite different products. Content, product descriptions and categorys will be different. I have another website that I bought with reasonable age and links in the industry that I was going to 301 to the new site to give it a kick in the juice. So, not wanting to deceive my customers in anyway, I was thinking I would call it a "division of" or "sister site to" the existing ecommerce site, with a single link back and forward between the two sites. Would there be anything wrong with this in googles eyes? Even with same contact details? They would be run on totally different platforms and hosted by totally different providers. Or would you keep them totally seperate and only have contact details in images? Or a step further and have totally different phone numbers etc? Then the shopping cart - I would love some suggestions on which opensourse cart to use, preferrably one that I can set up myself, and that has a good framework for seo. I want to use schema.org, authorship, seo friendly urls all of which I am having trouble getting out of the developer of my asp.net site.... I don't want the new site to be asp.net Thanks in advance!!
Web Design | | catfree0 -
Considering site navigation options
I am working on a site redesign and re evaluating concepts I haven't thought about for a few years. I generally see site navigation that is either "top-down" or "left bar". Top down navigation normally uses the left nav. for search refinements. The benefit of top nav. is that it clears up the center of the page for non navigation content. The drawback is that you can't fit as many categories in a top nav. Left side nav. can hold a long list of categories, but subcategories are often in the center of the page. In the past, I have preferred to use left nav. with a multi level scroll over search refinement. I believe this allowed users to get to their destination page with fewer clicks. (I have always believed that every required additional click causes lost customers). I also believe that this has caused me to get more juice flowing to deeper pages on sites and better long-tail conversion. This means I have had pages with a LOT of links. With this method, I have tightly controlled my categories. What on other sites are often dynamic search refinements, are on my sites additional categories. I am considering making a site with a top down navigation system. I like the additional screen space in the center I get to work with. Is my assumption about pages created by search refinement wrong? Is it ok for SEO to have a left nav that has a bunch of search refinements that are dynamically created?
Web Design | | EugeneF0 -
What is the best SEO friendly CMS platform?
Would like to build some content sites and would appreciate some guidance on what you believe to be the most SEO friendly CMS platform. I'm also hoping to find something that doesn't require much HTML and is pretty easy to jump into.
Web Design | | EdStaton0