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Ben that's a good point - I apologize for not saying so in my original reply - so in addition to having the to large visual links, or having two large boxes on that home page, having the Home | About Us | Home Products | Commercial Products | Contact Us link nav on the home page would also be quite beneficial - both for SEO and visitors. It lends credibility and usability to the experience.
yeah let me know if you need me to provide any clarity for the design mock-up process. glad to help!
You may likely need to have the URL the ads link to first go through a tracking page that then automatically passes through to the destination - it's not the cleanest solution, and would cause a short delay in the user's experience, however its the only way I know of that will allow you to trap the action.
Ben's partially correct. Unfortunately Google has been claiming they do process Javascript for a while, and they recently stated they've begun reading AJAX. Of course they do a lousy job of it and don't always get it right, which just makes things even more muddy.
So from an SEO best practices perspective, you shouldn't have the menu(s) in the first place, at all.
You may also THINK their good for users but has any significant study been performed to confirm that? You'd need to check click-through rates on all the links to know for sure.
What I've found through years of auditing sites that have such menus is that it almost always turns out to be the case where most of the deeper links NEVER get clicked on from within these menus. Instead, they're overwhelming to users. This is why it's better to not have them from a UX perspective.
If you abandon them and go with more traditional hierarchical index and sub-index pages, and if those are properly optimized, you'll not only eliminate the massive SEO problem but in fact get more of your category pages to have higher ranking strength and authority over time.
IF you're going to keep them in any form because you don't want to go to the extreme I recommend, then yes - AJAX would likely be the only scenario that offers the least likelihood of search engines choking on the over-use of links.
And for the record, the real current problem with all those links on every page is duplicate content confusion - all of those URLS at the source level dilutes the uniqueness of content on every page of the site. And that also means you're harming the topical focus of every page as well. So whatever you do, AJAX or doing away with them altogether is going to be of high value long term.
The SEO best practice is that your home page should have links to the most important pages on the site. So technically, just linking to each of the two primary sections you are doing that, given that each section's "home" page is important. Except that means your actual residential services top level services page and your commercial services top level services pages wouldn't be linked from the home page.
Yes, you can mitigate the problem using a solution similar to how Ben describes. However, I recommend that your main Residential landing page and your main Commercial landing page actually be the Services page for each - literally where you describe those services AND link to each of the services through a sidebar navigation in addition to that sections main topbar navigation.
Make sense?
You may want to ask this over on the helpdesk site https://seomoz.zendesk.com/home - while Moz team members routinely read and respond within the Q&A area, it's best to go there with this type of question - both to ensure tech support are the ones answering and to give them a heads up in case its a bug
My response is whether your desire is for long-term success online or not. If you aren't or "it's just a hobby", it may honestly not be worth the value, though even if it is just a hobby, imagine being able to eventually earn enough from a hobby that you can quit your day job.
Is it a guarantee you'll get enough value from a pro membership? No - of course not. Yet I only wish I'd joined all those years ago back when it was "just a couple sites" that I wanted to get better results from. Because in my case, that couple of sites effort grew into an amazing career.
So what it comes down to is how passionate you are to see success from your efforts, whatever scale they're on. And the more passion and/or the bigger the goal, the more valuable this place can be.
Heck - if you were to add up the hourly rate some of us in the Q&A area charge for the same kinds of answers we provide here, you'd likely find you're getting thousands of dollars worth of guidance for pennies on the dollar. (Admittedly lately I'm only answering questions here once in a while due to current workload, however there are plenty of great professionals who participate).
Throw in the ability to make use of some of best data evaluation tools in the industry (I get more value from Moz tools than from any other "similar" product) and it really can be a gold mine of value.
(posted by Alan Bleiweiss - Click2Rank's Search Director)
If there is enough unique content on each individual page, having the form on each of them is best practices from a Conversion Rate Optimization perspective.
Director of Search @ Click2Rank
while only 100 links is unlikely to generate a keyword specific penalty, using an exact match that way is definitely not best practices SEO, as it's so blatant. Its this exact kind of abuse of the reason for having anchors that has caused such a mess in our industry and forced Google to find new and continually ever increasing ways to punish sites.
So it's best to avoid this tactic altogether.
C2R Director of Search Services