Responsive design blowing out on page links?

[lovealbatross]

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

[evolvingSEO]

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

[lovealbatross]

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!

[FedeEinhorn]

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.