Doing a re-design but worried about my new navigation affecting rankings

[followuk]

Hi,

I'm a little worried/interested in the affects of my new navigation on ranking.

So here is the current site - followuk.co.uk/mothers-day

I have chosen an internal page because 99% of my traffic goes to these and generally external links and social shares happen on these pages (naturally because of the nature of the content).

As you can see I have a nav bar on the left which links to all other pages. In my new design I will get rid of this nav bar altogether and have a breadcrumb which will give the user the option to root back to a category page which will contain these links instead.

Kind of like this: Home > Important Dates > Mothers Day (if your on the mothers day page)

I'm in two minds because maybe pages are passing PageRank helping each other to rank, but on the other side maybe the strong pages which do rank well and gain links/social shares are not ranking as well because they are passing link juice through the navigation to other pages.

Any thoughts?

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Links do pass PageRank, but they don't drain a page of the PageRank it already has. If you link out from a page 100 times, it doesn't make that page 100 times weaker. Think of PageRank as coming in two forms: that which you accumulate via being linked to, and that which you can pass on because of your accumulated authority.

The only way in which adding more links to a page can be seen to be "damaging" is that if you link out 100 times from a page, each linked-to page receives roughly 1/100th of the passable strength from that page (links in footers or similar won't receive as much). However, if you link out 1000 times, each linked-to page receives 1/1000th of the passable link strength. Therefore, if you want a page to rank better, you need to consider whether you're diluting the amount of PageRank it receives due to the high number of links on other pages, not on the page itself.

Is this clearer? Sorry it's hard to explain, but we basically believe that PageRank comes in two forms: one which a page accumulates and one which it can pass on, and passing PR on doesn't weaken the page itself.

[followuk]

Hi Jane,

No they do rank well:

5th: Bank Holidays, 4th Mothers Day, 5th Fathers Day - The hard part now is pushing past Gov websites and the likes of Wikipedia.

Thanks for your reply, So links don't pass PageRank? Im a little confused because I always thought rel=nofollow stops PR hence the idea of Pagerank sculpturing?

Also what's the benefit of a silo structure? Because to my knowledge it retains more juice and makes everything that little more relevant - http://moz.com/blog/site-architecture-for-seo

Very interesting, I see your a bit of a Auth on SEO so really appreciate your input.

Ta.

[JaneCopland]

Addressing this point: "maybe the strong pages which do rank well and gain links/social shares are not ranking as well because they are passing link juice through the navigation to other pages."

I assume you meant "don't rank well"... the thing about PageRank is that to the best of our knowledge, it doesn't "leak". Think of PR as coming in two forms: the type a page accumulates and the type it can pass on are not the same thing. You don't drain a page of PageRank by linking out a lot, but you do ensure that linked-to pages receive less of the total available authority if you link out a large number of times. Of course, a page is going to suffer if you link to a million other pages, but this is mostly because it looks spammy and Google assumes the page is not user-friendly. There is nothing un-friendly about your current navigation - I'd personally not change it.

Hope this helps,

Jane

[gazzerman1]

Just looked at the current design and would recommend that you also use a schema.org to mark up your breadcrumb and other elements, this way you make 100% sure Google understands your site structure.

Removing your left navigation will remove the link juice being sent to those pages however. You will have to test how these internal links affect each page and how much influence they have on rankings.

[GlobeRunner]

Generally speaking, the navigation should be fine. I would be more worried if you were going to change URLs (the page URLs would be changing to other URLs). I would take a look further at the internal linking structure currently and see which pages link to which pages. Then, consider if your new navigation would add more internal links to those pages or take away internal links to those pages.

You can crawl your own site and see how many links are pointing to certain pages in order to see if your new navigation will increase the internal links to decrease those internal links.