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This a summary of my understanding of anchor text and hash tags, along with a question. I'm looking for confirmation of my assumptions and an answer to the question. Here we go:

1. Given these two links on a page in order, Google will use the anchor text "first"

a) First

b) a) Second

2. Given these two links on a page in order, Google will use the anchor text "Second"

a) First

b) Second

3. Given these three links on a page in order, Google will use the anchor text "Second" and "Third"

a) First

b) Second

c) Third

Is this consistent with your understanding of using hash tags to get around the first link rule?

Here's my question:

If I have the following 4 links on a page, does 50% of the link juice go to Page A and 50% to Page B; OR 25% to Page A and 75% to page B; OR something else?

www.example.com/Page-A.html

www.example.com/Page-B.html#anchor1

www.example.com/Page-B.html#anchor2

www.example.com/Page-B.html#anchor3

Thanks in advance.

Don't get involved in the billing or you will be out of pocket for Google clicks and chasing them for payment. Instead, set up the account in their name.

Next, create your own MCC account here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwords/myclientcenter/

Then you can login to their account and add your own account as administrator.

This way you can manage their account, but you are not liable for click payments. Also, if you part ways later, they get to keep their account.

As mentioned, a "flat architecture" is measured by how many clicks away pages are from the home page. You could put everything in the main directory and still have pages that require 10 clicks to get to, or have files within 7 folders that are linked to from the homepage.

That said, a logical hierarchy will make the most sense to you and your users.

Alan is right. I'll only add that you'll really want to look through the links he provided. Local SEO is a related, but very different animal than regular SEO.

Also, unless I missed an important detail, you may want to look into canonicalizing the manufacturer's site to your own site, assuming you don't care whether the manufacturer's site appears in the SERPS.

Thanks, Alan, you captured the dilemma perfectly. UI is important and SEO is important, so how does one quantify the pros and cons of each in the planning stages of a site. It's really kind of an educated guess.

I tend to lean towards your assessment for all of the reasons you cite. I'm in a competitive keyword space. So while I put a lot of weight on UI issues, I'm not inclined to ignore SEO opportunities for just minimal UI gains.

Interesting point about duplicate content. I suspect I'd have less of an issue with 20-30 links, but I could definitely see where DC could become a problem with larger navs. I like the breadcrumbs idea too.

I'm wondering if I'm placing too much emphasis on the too many links issue. However, to me it seems like a huge advantage to funnel link juice where I want it with well placed internal links in the body of content. I've had good success with this before. I would think that these targeted links would carry significantly more juice if I can reduce the number of links per page from 30 to 10 --- all by eliminating 20 nav links to less important pages. It just feels like a big SEO performance hit to me to have 200% more links in the nav? Am I wrong? Does Google not flow much link juice through nav links?

Thanks for the reply, but please allow me to play devil's advocate.

I generally subscribe to users first mantra too, but is using subnavs on category pages vs. full dropdowns on every page a huge user experience hit? Taken to extremes, always choosing either a users always first approach or a SEO always first approach is not optimal. There has to be some measure of balance even if you lean heavily towards the users first approach (as I generally do).

Is there no meaningful benefit to removing from every page 20 links that provide no additional SEO benefit and only serve to dilute the impact of other more important links? Or, do you think that using full dropdown navs provides a truly significant user experience benefit?

I should add that the 24 link scenario already includes consolidation of related topics, so the answer can't be more consolidation!

I've been wrestling with this one for a while. Take a standard small web site navigation with nav links for:

• Products

• Solutions

• Support

• Learning Center

I believe having drop downs to show the sub-pages of each category provides a better user experience, but it also bloats my links per page in the navigation from 4 to 24. Most of the additional links are useful for user experience, but not search purposes. So, 2-years after Google's changing of how it treats nofollows (which used to be the easy answer to this question), what is considered best practice?

A) Go ahead and add the full 24 nav links on each page. The user experience outweighs the SEO benefits of fewer links and Google doesn't worry too much about nav links relative to main body links.

B) Stick to only 4 nav options. Having 20 additional links on every page is a big deal and removing them is worth the user experience hit. I can still get to all levels of this small site within 2-3 clicks and do cross category linking to mitigate silos.

C) Use some technical voodoo with js links or iframes to hide the nav links from Google and get the best of both worlds.

D) Do something that is not one of the first three choices.

Does anyone feel strongly about any of the above options or is this a user-preference type of situation where it doesn't make much difference which option you choose on a small 100-200 page site?

I'm really looking forward to everyone's thoughts on this.

-DV

Thanks, I've noticed the site: www issue that you mention, but I'm coming around to the idea that it's a result of other factors, not the length of the url itself.

Do you think Google degrades internal footer links? Here is my concern illustrated in an example:

Image a home page with "40 points" of link juice to pass on. It has 4 links and 2 of them are footer links. Do you think 34 points would transfer to other pages, allowing 15% for normal evaporation as juice is passed, or do you think Google might do something like this:

Body link 1: 8.5 pts

Body Link 2: 8.5 pts

Footer Link 1: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)

Footer Link 2: 5 pts (degraded because it's a footer)

Total: Only 27 pts passed (and 7pts of juice lost forever)

This is how I'd imagine excessive footer links hurting a site. I have no idea if it works this way in reality. However, most would agree that external links in the footer are not worth as much as body links, so why would that logic not be applied to internal, navigational links?

SEOmoz has extensive footer links on the home page. Anyone from SEOmoz want to explain how SEOmoz evaluated the use of footer links?

I tend to agree with you. I suspect that urls with fewer folders rank better because of the flow of juice to those pages, not only because of the number of folders. www.site.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/content.html would probably rank fine if it had a direct link from the home page.

FYI, this is a B2B lead gen site. I agree having a flat site with everything a click or 2 away is best. My question is a little more specific and revolves around whether these tactics are worth the time and effort

1. I could manually build navigation and have all of my pages in the main directory or maybe 1 folder deep, OR dynamically build navigation based on folder structure and maybe have a site with many of my pages 2 or 3 folders deep. Any benefit to the former, because the latter is definitely easier.

2. Are extensive footer links generally a net benefit? Looks like SEOmoz uses them.

I have two architecture related questions.

1. Fewer folders is better. For example, www.site.com/product should rank better than www.site.com/foldera/folderb/product, all else constant. However, to what extreme does it make sense to remove folders? With a small site of 100 or so pages, why not put all files in the main directory? You'd have to manually build the navigation versus tying navigation to folder structure, but would the benefit justify the additional effort on a small site?

2. I see a lot of sites with expansive footer menus on the home page and sometimes on every page. I can see how that would help indexing and user experience by making every page a click or two apart. However, what does that do to the flow of link juice? Does Google degrade the value of internal footer links like they do external footer links? If Google does degrade internal footer links, then having a bunch of footer links would waste link juice by sending a large portion of juice through degraded links, wouldn't it?

Thank you in advance,

-Derek

Interesting approach, thank you.

Thanks.

Thanks for the reply Cowboy.

301 is the ultimate destination but could be months or year away for reasons beyond my control and there is enough juice being lost to warrant a temporary solution. I've seen the references to Google and meta refreshses, which is why I posed the question, but I've also seen people say 0 second refreshes have worked.

I just want to make sure nobody had a story like: "we did that once and dropped off the index", etc. I'm thinking that the temporary gain is worth the risk if any, unless I hear differently from somebody.

For a number of reasons I'm confined to having to do a client side redirect for html pages. Am I right in thinking that Google treats zero seconds roughly the same as proper 301 redirects? Anyone have experience with zero second meta refresh redirects, good or bad?