Too Many On-Page Links
-
Most of my pages have "Too Many On-Page Links".
If you view the website you will see this is mainly down to the top navigation drop down menu: http://www.cwesolutions.co.uk
So if I wanted to reduce the number of links I would have to have category links with landing pages.
How much does having "Too Many On-Page Links" effect my website ranking? Is it really important and would I notice a difference if I changed it?
-
In the sense that a report is alerting that there are too many links on a page though is going to be because it is warning of authority leakage more than anything else though.
Granted, the insertion of 'just' in my previous statement probably misleads...
I agree though that if you were to link every page to every page, it would just cause a royal headache to crawlers - why one would do that though is beyond me.
-
Sorry Pete, that was a typo where I meant to say 'internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage' (I've amended my reply).
-
To say "linking just dilutes the authority from the page" is not strictly true.
In this particular instance I do not believe that the menu is too OTT in terms of links but if you have every page linking to every page you just end up creating a mesh of links that search engines can waste crawl time trying to decipher.
Too many links with poor structure can mean that your crawl allocation is wasted which results in less of your pages being indexed properly.
-
Thanks Geoff, but want did you mean here...
Internal linkage is classed differently as internal linkage?
-
What makes you think you have too many on page links? Internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage, linking just dilutes the authority from the page (amongst other crawlability and usability factors), but if it's internal linkage, at least the authority is kept on your domain.
Simple, effective and easy to use navigation is critical to website usability and will have an affect on performance in search engines. In your example, I wouldn't expect any negative ranking affects to occur as a result of the style of navigation menu your website utilises. If that is deemed most useful for your customers, then that's the best approach.
-
Use a tool such as SEOmoz' Crawl Test or Xenu's Link Sleuth to determine any crawling issues. There are a number of free online tools for this too.
-
Thanks for your reply and explanation. One more question... How would I know if the bots are having a problem crawling my website?
-
Too many links on a page can make it difficult for bots to crawl your site. If you have over 100 links on page, make certain you have a sitemap that lays out a road map for the bots.
If your site is being effectively crawled, don't worry about it. I would worry if the linking structure is impacting the user experience or if deeper pages weren't getting crawled.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pushstate and Infinite Scrolling Article Pages: Is it detrimental to not change URLs as the page is being scrolled?
I've noticed a recent trend of news sites using infinite scrolling on article pages to garner more pageviews and I can assume serve up more ads. Here is an overview. Here is an article from NBC news that uses this technique: http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/music/grammys-2016-here-s-why-adele-s-performance-was-out-n519186 Studies have shown that this technique has decreased bounce rates by +15% for some sites. My question is: If a site is using the technique without changing URLs as the user scrolls down what overall negative effects does this have? Obviously you wouldn't be getting credit for the extra pageviews but I was wondering if there were any indexation implications with this. Here is an example of article infinite scrolling without changing the URL: http://www.wftv.com/news/national-content/deputies-wife-attacks-husband-because-he-didnt-get-her-a-valentines-day-gift/87691927
Web Design | | Cox-Media-Group1 -
Is it important to keep your website home index page simple to rank better?
My website http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ markets holiday cottages and it's grown from my own singular cottage into a small letting agency and I used to rank at best number 3 for the short tailed keywords like Whitby holiday cottages with its drop-down to position 10 on Google.co.uk. So this week I was looking for a UK business to help me improve my rankings and the first thing they said was my home page is detrimental with the listing too many conflicting info with it advertising all 12 properties on it. They suggested a door entry page into the site keeping it simple but when I run it through the analysing tool here on Moz for "Whitby holiday cottages" as an example it came out looking okay. I do the usual things of title tags and meta descriptions for my keywords etc any suggestions or advice would be very welcome thank you Alan
Web Design | | WhitbyHolidayCottages0 -
Our on page blog is off page! What?
Hi Moz Community, I have a customer who has a blog that is FULL of great unique content however the blog resides at a URL that differs from the main site. Eg. blog.mywebsite.com Instead of www.mywebsite.com/blog . With the latest Google updates I fear that this may be hurting our web ranking. In addition the web blog is a carbon copy of the main URL. My Question: I am going to schedule a meeting with the web designers, How vociferously should I argue for having them move the blog onsite and write 301 redirects for the current blog site?
Web Design | | CKerr0 -
Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?
If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?
Web Design | | jaychow0 -
Home page redirect - will this cause an SEO problem
Hello, We are using Wordpress to build a wiki site. The wiki plugin we're using (Wordpress Wiki lite) can only be set up on an internal page like nlpwiki(dot)org/wiki Can we redirect the home page to the /wiki subdirectory and use nlpwiki(dot)org/wiki as our home page? I've never done that, just wondering if it will be indexed as the home page or if there are any connonical issues. Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Menu Links
I am building a website with the category "water damage repair" and in the menu of the website I want a drop-down menu that contains the keyword + geolocation for example "water damage detroit" "water damage chicago" "water damage New York" and they will all be drop downs so that I can have the exact match keywords in the menu and on the page but I want them all to link to the same page so that I don't have to build out 5 different pages that all have the same general information on them, I would rather just have the categories with the keyword rich words then them all point to the same area. Is this a good idea to have a drop down menu for a category "Water Damage Repair" and then have 5 different Exact match keywords like "water damage detroit" and then have all of those exact match keywords link to the same page or should they all have individual content for each exact patch keyword even though they are all the same topic?
Web Design | | SEOWizards0 -
Sub-pages with more links than homepage - bad?
Hi,
Web Design | | rayvensoft
I am working on merging a number of my niche websites into a larger site (301 redirects, phased in over a few months). My question/concern is whether google will penalize the main site when it sees that the homepage has almost no links to it, and that about 10-15 sub-pages have a lot of links back to it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of scenario? Will it create a problem? Theoretically I could spend a year or so building up links to the new main page - building the brand - before doing the 301's. The smaller pages still bring in clients, but it is getting hard to maintain that many micro sites. Thanks in advance for any help.0 -
Sudden dramatic drops in SERPs along with no snippet and no cached page?
We are a very stable, time tested domain (over 15 yrs old) with thousands of stable, time tested inbound links. We are a large catalog/e commerce business and our web team has over a decade's experience with coding, seo etc. We do not engage in link exchanges, buying links etc and adhere strictly to best white hat seo practices. Our SERPs have generally been very stable for years and years. We continually update content, leverage user generated content etc, and stay abreast of important algorithm and policy changes on Google's end. On Wednesday Jan 18th, we noticed dramatic, disturbing changes to our SERPs. Our formerly very stable positions for thousands of core keywords dropped. In addition, there is no snippet in the SERPs and no cached page for these results. Webmaster tools shows our sitemap most recently successfully downloaded by Google on Jan 14th. Over the weekend and monday the 16th, our cloud hosted site experienced some downtime here and there. I suspect that the sudden issues we are seeing are being caused by one of three possibilities: 1. Google came to crawl when the site was unavailable.
Web Design | | jamestown
However, there are no messages in the account or crawl issues otherwise noted to indicate this. 2. There is a malicious link spam or other attack on our site. 3. The last week of December 2011, we went live with Schema.org rich tagging on product level pages. The testing tool validates all but the breadcrumb, which it says is not supported by Schema. Could Google be hating our Schema.org microtagging and penalizing us? I sort of doubt bc category/subcategory pages that have no such tags are among those suffering. Whats odd is that ever since we went live with Schema.org, Google has started preferring very thin content pages like video pages and articles over our product pages. This never happened in the past. the site is: www.jamestowndistributors.com Any help or ideas are greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank You DMG0