Site Navigation
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav.
Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are:
1. Category
ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden
2. Subcat
ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath
3. Family
ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories
Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them.
Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts?
Thanks!
-Zack
-
Thanks Takeshi thats good advice, I am going to try and figure out how to test it.
-
My personal preference when it comes to navigation is fewer options than too many. The tendency is to want to put everything in there, "just in case", but most users will not even click on a fraction of those links, and you can end up confusing people with too many options.
I would install a click tracker such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale (or use Google in-page analytics) to figure out which links people are actually using, and then remove the ones people aren't clicking on as much. I'm also a big fan of changing the navigation based on what section of the site you are, so when you're on the homepage the navigation might only display the top level categories, but when you drill down it shows you more categories.
As for SEO impact, there are both pros and cons. On the one hand, you reduce the number of links per page (general recommendation is around 100 links per page), but you will no longer be linking to those sub-sub-categories from your home page. My suggestion, as with any large sitewide change, would be to test it. Test removing the links for a week or two, and see if it has any impact on SEO or user metrics. Then decide whether to keep them or leave them based on actual data.
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
-
Canonical tag on a large site
when would you reccomend using a canonical tag on a large site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cristiana.Solinas0 -
No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
Hi Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products . Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure. I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas? It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Mobile Site Annotations
Our company has a complex mobile situation, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to implement bidirectional annotations and a mobile sitemap. Our mobile presence consists of three different "types" of mobile pages: Most of our mobile pages are mobile-specific "m." pages where the URL is completely controlled via dynamic parameter paths, rather than static mobile URLs (because of the mobile template we're using). For example: http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory. We have created vanity 301 redirects for the majority of these pages, that look like http://m.example.com/product that simply redirect to the previous URL. Six one-off mobile pages that do have a static mobile URL, but are separate from the m. site above. These URLs look like http://www.example.com/product.mobile.html Two responsively designed pages with a single URL for both mobile and desktop. My questions are as follows: Mobile sitemap: Should I include all three types of mobile pages in my mobile sitemap? Should I include all the individual dynamic parameter m. URLs like http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory in the sitemap, or is that against Google's recommendations? Bidirectional Annotations: We are unable to add the rel="canonical" tag to the m. URLs mentioned in section #1 above because we cannot add dynamic tags to the header of the mobile template. We can, however, add them to the .mobile.html pages. For the rel="alternate" tags on the desktop versions, though, is it correct to use the dynamic parameter URLs like http://m.example.com/?original_path=/directory/subdirectory as the mobile version target for the rel="alternate" tag? My initial thought is no, since they're dynamic parameter URLs. Is there even any benefit to doing this if we can't add the bidirectional rel="canonical" on those same m. dynamic URLs? I'd be immensely grateful for any advice! Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Critical_Mass0 -
SEO firm site audit
needs recommendation for a site audit. Post panda/ post penguin experience preferred. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | skyao0 -
301 entire site
Is there a good 301 code snippet to change just the root domain but keep the ending extensions? I just bid on a domain that I think would be much better for me moving forward, but do not want to have to try going through thousands of pages to do their 301 individually My site is almost 4 yrs old. Well established and has a large fanbase. Several of our social networks are under the name of the new branded domain, hence part of the desire to switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
How Does This Site Rank So Well?!
So this website -> http://bailbondsripoffreport.com/ Ranks on the First Page for the term "Bail Bonds" It's the spammiest crappiest piece of junk website ever! lol - How does this site rank so well, it's not even a year old and it's link structure is crap. Can I like report them and have them removed lol. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utahseopros0
