What is the best top menu linking structure (for SEO) for my site: A or B?

[csblev]

I don't know if these two scenarios are any different as far as SEO is concerned, but I wanted to ask to get an opinion.

On my website: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com you can see there is a top menu with "About" "Info" "Questions" etc.  Some of these links lead to further pages that are essentially a indeces for multiple further links.

My question is: in terms of SEO, is it better to A) have all links (that are now on the pages that the menu links lead to) displayed in a drop down menu directly from the top menu (and bypassing an intermediate page) or B) to have it as it is now where you have to click to an intermediate page (like "rain chain info") to get access to the links (and not have such a large drop down menu)

Is there a difference in terms of SEO?  In terms of useability it almost seems like a toss up between the two, so if there were better SEO value to one of the other, then I would choose that one.

By the way, I know that the way it is structured now is strange, where there is only one drop down that leads to the same page as the top menu item, but that will be fixed, fyi.

Thanks!

[csblev]

Thanks!

[StalkerB]

Hmm, can't replicate it and just ran your site through Xenu to crawl it and it would appear it was just me navigating using the address bar.

I doubt many people will be doing that, though I often change through sections on ecommerce sites directly.

However it does show up things like http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/all-products/products/large-copper-pails-rain-chain and http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/styled-cup-designs/products/large-copper-pails-rain-chain

So rel=canonical or maybe a redirect on the product pages wouldn't hurt

[csblev]

I think I might be adding a bunch more links on some of those pages, but perhaps I'll make most of them link directly from the top menu and then some of those links will link to pages with more links (like an article index). Cool, thanks.

One questions though (and thanks for bringing it to my attention): how did you get to this same page with two links?

http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/floral-designs/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina

and

http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina

I can only get to that page through the first url above.  Where is the link that leads to the page with the second url?

[AlanMosley]

If you had all pages linked from the home page, and all pages linking back to the home page but no other pages, this would rank your home page the highest, but it may not be the best for your users.

[StalkerB]

Are you likely to get a lot more pages/products?

If not having everything accessible via drop downs would be my preference, not least of all as a user because if you make me click to a page to get to another page I'm not going to be sticking around long and search engines do want you to think about the users.

This is replicated in search engines by pages you have to click twice to get to being further down the link juice chain even if it's the next subfolder down in terms of URLs.

Actually looking at it, is is possible to get to the pages using different routes? http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina and http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/floral-designs/products/copper-blossoms-rain-chain-patina would appear to be the same.

There's no canonical tag so actually I'd have a think about my site structure in general (appreciate it can be hard with ecommerce sites). Here's an interesting YouMOZ post - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-effect-of-site-structure-on-organic-traffic-add-categories-ampamp-products.

Also, from a conversion point of view I may make a link to my top level categories of products accessible from all pages.