Structuring navigation for maximum effect

[caravan]

Hi,

I am working with a client (in the property niche) who has 200+ links on each page of their site mainly due to an extensive navigation menu. They have good domain authority (although some competitors have a lot better) and some excellent links from some fantastic domains but the keywords just aren’t moving. (Sidenote: most links point to the home page with some going to property detail pages not location pages which is where I’d like people to be landing).

I am reviewing the site structure and other technical aspects and have some questions regarding how the navigation is structured.

Firstly is 200+ links an ok number to have? Everything I read points to 100 being a magic number to aim for.

Secondly, the site navigation menu contains a list of locations. The first tier being country, the second tier drops down to list the regions within that country, then a third tier drop down appears to list the towns and cities in those regions. So from any page in the site you can drill down to town/city locations. (Sidenote: I have run Hotjar on the site which shows most people are using the search facility not the navigation menu to search)

Is this style of navigation ok or does it dilute the link authority/pagerank/juice being past to each page?

Would a better option be to have the first and second tier in the drop down then the third level town navigation to appear in the sidebar at page level in the appropriate sections? What effect would such a change have on rankings?

[caravan]

Hi Peter,

The conclusion I have come to is to try to keep page links to around 100 but that said there is a lot of conflicting info out there which is where the confusion comes in. I have read that 100-200 is ok now a days but essentially the more links you have the more the page authority will be diluted so it makes sense to keep links down.

On this topic Moz’s on page grader tool says

“Google has confirmed that the use of too many internal links on a page will not trigger a penalty, but it can influence the quantity of link juice sent through those links and dilute your page's ability to have search engines crawl, index, and rank link targets.

Recommendation: Scale down the number of internal links on your page to fewer than 100, if possible. At a minimum, try to keep navigation and menu links to fewer than 100. See http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many.”

In my situation there are some unnecessary and duplicated links so I looking at ways in which these can be reduced. My hope is that the page authority will then be channeled to the more important areas of the site.

Regarding location of the links, those in the navigation will probably carry more weight than those in the footer so I would try to include your most important links in the top part of the page.  If you look at Moz’s home page for example the footer links are pointing to pages like Contact us, research tools, parents, api and Terms rather than duplicating the main navigation again.

That is my take on the situation anyway.

Hope this helps,
Andy

[PeteC12]

Hi Andy,

I have a similar situation with my site so I am interested in what is advised here as I've also thought maybe page sculpting is the answer but I've heard different answers on this subject. In my case , the 100 link rule wont work

From what I've read and heard in google hangouts etc

1. 100 Links per page is out of date now as google can and does read more links than this.
2. The types of links and where they are on the page does affect its importance. I.e Navigation and footer links are treated differently
3. Do you have duplication in the links ? i.e anything that appears both in the footer and the nav or someone else on the page?

I remember John Mueller (Google) recently advised against Page Sculpting as it could more harm than good.

Please share what you find out as this is an interesting topic which will benefit many on there

thanks

Pete

[caravan]

Thanks for the advice Josh. Will PM you