Could a dropdown list of products dilute the page content?

[SimplyPlastic]

Hi all,

On our site, due to the fact we only have some 120 or so products split across 5 different categories we have a dropdown menu that displays all of the products in the menu.

Forgetting usability for a moment, my question is whether by having links to all of products appear on each and every page (because they are in the main menu), are we diluting the content on the page. For example, if I take a particular product - the main phrase I want that page to be discovered for is "perspex sheet". This phrase does appear in the H1, H2 and within the main description of the product - but, as mentioned, each of our pages has some 120+ internal links due to the menu which contain all sorts of product names that arent relevant to "perspex sheet". The Moz report does flag a Medium issue on every page due to the number of internal links.

I don't know whether I'm making a fuss about nothing, or whether this does have some serious side effects. It's an eCommerce site so of course im nervous of making changes that could have an adverse affect on our rankings.

I thought there used to be a tool on Moz that showed what phrases a page was optimised for but i can no longer find that tool.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Al

[Everett]

Hello Alastair,

You have two issues to be concerned with:

1. Dilution of content, as you described above.

2. Dilution of pagerank, as Blue Corona described above.

There are several approaches to consider that deal with both issues:

1. Don't worry about it because it's only 120 products/links.
Pros: easy.
Cons: Not optimal, and product catalog may continue to grow.

2. Create "Silos" in which only other products from that category are linked to, rather than the entire product catalog.
Cons: Could be confusing to users when navigating the site. Pros: Effective SEO strategy in some cases, and would reduce the amount of product URLs linked to from each product page by about 1/5 (assuming an ~equal category distribution of products). Also, the links would be more relevant to each product page from which they're being linked - and would probably contain more relevant keywords than other categories, limiting dilution of content.

3. Rather than siloing by category, add a navigation for Top Products (or similar) so you can choose ~25 of your top products (by whatever metrics make sense to the business, such as mark-up, demand, stock...) to boost with internal pagerank distribution (or "link juice" as it was put above).

4. Don't link to any products in the navigation and instead focus that pagerank into category pages, which you then optimize by adding helpful content and dealing with typically rampant pagination/canonicalization issues those pages have. Those category pages, once optimized, will funnel some of the pagerank into the product pages.

I like options #3 and #4 the best for most sites, but then most sites I work on have far more products to deal with.

[BlueCorona]

Hi Alastair,

Moz has a great blog post that discusses how many links is too many. I would check that out for advice—while there isn't an exact number of links you should not exceed, many people suggest having fewer than 100 links per page.

Something I would be worried about is link juice. When your website receives a backlink from another website, hopefully with a high domain authority (YAY!), the link juice is being spread out to ALL the pages being linked from the page they are linking to.

This means if www.cnn.com (who has a domain authority of 96) links to your company's homepage, they would be spreading some of their authority to you through "link juice". But instead of retaining majority of that juice/authority on the homepage (thus increasing the authority on that page), you are going to be spreading fewer and fewer amounts of that authority through all 120+ pages linked from the homepage.

Check out this link juice diagram to get a visual representation of what I am talking about.

Hope this helps!