Too many navigational links

[MarcelMoz]

Hi there,

I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages.

Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure.

1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages. 
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?).

This is the situation:

• The website is a webshop
• The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here.

Now here's the problem:

• The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option.

But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues.

Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this?

Note: pages have good organic positions and authority.

Thanks a lot.

Marcel

[MarcelMoz]

Hello Peter,

Thank you for your very clear answer. I was thinking about collecting user behaviour data for this dropdown menu by using Analytics' onclick event trackers. Your idea is way better to use a clickmap or heatmap!

I checked the internal links again and I think there must be a way to cut out some unimportant product categories in the navigation menu and cut out some non-essential footer links.

So, I am not going to change my winning team drastically. I am going to collect some data and I will decide after that what to do with all the links in the dropdown menu.

Once again, thanks for the help. I can move on now.

Marcel

[Dr-Pete]

When you say 7,000, do you mean that you have 7,000 links on each page or that 7,000 pages show a "too many links" warning? I'm having trouble resolving 7K with your other numbers.

Ultimately, it's a balancing act, as I wrote about a while back:

http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

The more links you have, the less love each page you link to will get. It's not just SEO - it's anything. The more options you give people, typically, the less attention each option will get. So, it's a balancing act. Highlighting more options might get link equity to more places, but it'll be spread thinner. There's really no way in 2013 to get around that.

On the usability side, I'd only ask this (from many prior experiences) - do you have data to back up that these links are very important for visitors? I've found many times that, once we did user testing or click mapping (like Crazy Egg), "essential" secondary navigation links turned out to be rarely used. Even now, many visitors to many site (especially non-technical sites) don't really understand or use dropdowns, especially multi-level ones. Too often, these links are important to management, not the actual visitors. I don't know your audience or your site, so I don't mean to make assumptions, but I'd strongly encourage you to collect that data, if you haven't.

As Miki said, if you're generally ranking well, and if these links really do have user value, then I wouldn't do anything drastic. There may be ways to prune a few non-essential links or maybe fine-tune your information architecture, but slashing away at them may do more harm than good.

[JMacSupply]

If you are already enjoying good rankings in the SERPS, I would not worry about this issue. Rather, I would spend your time developing your site more with good content, as well as continuing to try to build high quality links.

[MarcelMoz]

That's what I thought too. But I'm still affraid search engine spiders can't find their way no more in some time. The worst pages has 305 links on it. And building up the authority costs a lot of money.

Will solving these issues bring a lot of benefits?

[JMacSupply]

If "Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option.," AND "pages have good organic positions and authority" - I would not worry about the error - continue to build authority and valuable content and you'll be fine.  Look how many internal links Amazon has, and they are doing just fine in the SERPS.