Responsive design blowing out on page links?
-
Hi guys,
We have a site about to launch with a responsive design to suit desktop, tablet and mobile. Each design carries it's own navigation as one primary set of navigational links won't suit all versions of the design. So as desktop resizes to mobile (or tablet) the desktop navigation is hidden (css) and replaced by the nav more suited to the mobile experience (hope I've explained that ok!).
Problem is that if the primary navigation carries 50 links then all 3 designs together carry 150 links which is too many on page links. Is that going to be a problem? Is there a tag that can be applied to the mobile/tablet nav links? Like a canonical tag but for links??
Cheers in advance of your ideas
James -
Hi James
While I fully disclose I'm not intimately familiar with the ins and outs of responsive, I do believe that instead of CSS hiding/showing the same links but having them repeated three times in the HTML, ideally the links would be in the HTML once, and CSS would take care of just restyling them based upon the screen size.
But with that said, Google does not mind so much about the "too many links on a page" situation. They are good enough now to likely figure out what is going on with your menu, and will try to take that into account when assessing the page, and when assigning PageRank through each link.
So while it would be 100% perfect to not repeat every link it's still something that's not going to be detrimental if you had to leave it that way. The only exception to that I think, would be if this is a super large site (like 100,000+ pages) but I don't get the impression this site is quite that big
-Dan
-
Thanks for your response Federico.
It is responsive in that it is only 1 single design but it is 3 different groups of navigational links all pointing to exactly the same urls. So 3 links pointing to each category and product page. Essentially it's navigation x3. As the responsive design shifts to accommodate tablets/mobiles the desktop navigation hides and is replaced by the previously hidden mobile or tablet navigation. So there are necessarily 3 lots of on page links. I'm hoping there's either a tag that can cater for this to append to the extra links OR perhaps someone will suggest that 'too many' is OK if they're legitimate, non spammy and user essential links. Hope that makes sense!
-
As I understand it, a responsive design should fit any device (of course with a minimum). Links in the menu should point to the same pages. For example, a menu (within desktop) shows: page1, page2, page3 and page4. While on mobile it only shows page1 and page3, as the other 2 pages are not available for mobile devices. Then you hide those links (page2 and page4) from the menu. Page1 and Page3 should also be responsive and adjust automatically to the user's width.
You don't have to build separate page versions for mobile/tablet/desktop within a responsive design, if you do, then instead of a responsive design you will end up with a mobile version AND a desktop one.
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
-
Splitting Page Authority with two URLs for the same page.
Hello guys, My website is currently holding two different URLs for the same page and I am under the impression such set up is dividing my Page Authority and Link Juice. We currently have the following page with both URLs below: www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/home.aspx
Technical SEO | | JoaoPdaCosta-WBR
www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/ Analysing the page authority and backlinks I identified that we are splitting the amount of backlinks (links from sites, social media and therefore authority). "/home.aspx"
PA: 67
Linking Root Domains: 52
Total Links: 272 "/"
PA: 64
Linking Root Domains: 29
Total Links: 128 I am under the impression that if the URLs were the same we would maximise our backlinks and therefore page authority. My Question: How can I fix this? Should I have a 301 redirect from the page "/" to the "/home.aspx" therefore passing the authority and link juice of “/” directly to “/homes.aspx”? Trying to gather thoughts and ideas on this, suggestions are much appreciated? Thanks!0 -
2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?
I am working on a site that has a home page containing 2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link. I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored. This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page..... Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page?? Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site 🙂
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
Affiliate links
I have a wordpress blog and was wondering the best seo practice for doing affiliate link redirects? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Mega Menus - Site Links - Bottom of the Page
Here are the questions: If you replace your top menu with a mega menu - like rei.com, target.com etc - that has dramatically more links and lots of non-optimized testimonials and calls for action, and locate the actual code of the mega menu at the bottom of the HTML , How will this affect your sitelinks? Will this now, make your on-page content more visible and indexable? Or does the Google bott dismiss this as just navigation content? In the past, I've have seen this technique work well, but that was before site links were easier to obtain. Looking at sites with virtually no navigation on their home pages and good authority, I've seen site links seemingly gleamed from alt attributes.
Technical SEO | | Runner20090 -
Top pages give " page not found"
A lot of my top pages point to images in a gallery on my site. When I click on the url under the name of the jpg file I get an error page not found. For instance this link: http://www.fastingfotografie.nl/architectuur-landschap/single-gallery/10162327 Is this a problem? Thanks. Thomas. JkLej.png
Technical SEO | | thomasfasting0 -
Renaming of pages
About 2 months ago one of our clients renamed a section of his website. The worst part is that the URLs of the page also changed. New page: http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmo Old page: http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmoe The problem now is that the new page get absolutely no page-rank transfered from the old page. It also get no mozrank at all. Also if I try to find it in the Open Site Explorer it can not be found.The old page can, but not the new one. We have updated the sitemap.xml and also done proper 301 redirect for the pages since about 2 months. Any ideas here? This page was a very important page in terms of traffic so very much thankful for any input. Have a great day Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
How to measure number of links out from a page
Following on from earlier Q, what do you all use to count links out from a page. I believe there is a bing tool which does this, though rather than a list of sites a simple number would be ideal?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
What's the difference between a category page and a content page
Hello, Little confused on this matter. From a website architectural and content stand point, what is the difference between a category page and a content page? So lets say I was going to build a website around tea. My home page would be about tea. My category pages would be: White Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Team and British Tea correct? ( I Would write content for each of these topics on their respective category pages correct?) Then suppose I wrote articles on organic white tea, white tea recipes, how to brew white team etc...( Are these content pages?) Do I think link FROM my category page ( White Tea) to my ( Content pages ie; Organic White Tea, white tea receipes etc) or do I link from my content page to my category page? I hope this makes sense. Thanks, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0