Internal linking for small site
-
I have a site with 13 pages, 6 are product pages, 5 are free tips pages (the other 2 are the home page and contact form). Currently I have the navbar at top of site with a "products" dropdown menu for the 6 product pages and a "Tips" dropdown menu for the 5 tip pages. All categories except the contact page are at the bottom as breadcrumbs, the homepage is "home" and the rest are relevant user friendly keyword anchor text.
So I have 2 more pages to ad to "Tips" and am wondering whether to have a new 2nd level tips page that links to a 3rd level of 7 different tips pages, or keep it shallow as it is, with only 2 levels from the homepage to the other (now 13) pages, with a potential of 22 pages in the foreseable few years? (and some graphics work to make it user friendly like how Zappo's has categories to the side on each of its drop down navbar menu's and non-link text categories for its bottom of page breadcrumb links)
Can those aforementioned pages linking to each other in the footer dilute link equity? (I think that's one of the primary reasons I'm curious).
What do you think of this: http://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/2012/08/08/internal-linking-101-5-best-practices/ (I guess I should no follow my contact page), could it be better to have a 2nd level page for "Tips" to get more equity to that page rather than across all 7 tips pages?
I have read around about this on here (hence how I found out about Zappo's) and elsewhere and wanted ask to make sure.
-
Why not make a Nother navigation bar called Q&A or frequently asked questions something similar to that tips. And set of adding to the length which could be hard to click on some mobile devices.
I honestly do not think that you're going to get much more out of your website by no following good links on your site for instance if those webpages are going to get any information at all pointing to them or anything links pointing to them it'll all be wasted. So I don't really believe the fishbowl effect is necessary for this type of thing. A great resource I found for very technical questions is this one right here.
To make a long answer short I would not no follow or no index I would simply add on another category called tips or questions FAQ whatever you like.
I also agree with SEO consultant that is never a good idea to build sites with search engines in mind you should always do it with the customer or user.
I hope this is of help sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thanks for your reply. I agree about user experience but for both options it can be made user friendly so I might as well choose one that is best for SEO as well.
The main difference on having 3 levels being that the footer and Navbar would only have a "Tips" link, which might be neat, but then if not then all tips would be individually linked on the footer under a non-linked text title of "Tips" and on navbar (similar to Zappo's Navbar but much smaller, going sideways on dropdown menus doesn't look that uncommon) which would give the same info that you would get by clicking onto a 2nd level Tips page, might that also be preferable to user on a small site like mine (say 10 different tips pages eventually). I added some more stuff to my original post about spreading internal link equity, which I didn't think to mention originally.
-
Well I would say that this should firstly be dictated by the user experience, as opposed to building your menus with search engines in mind. Although this seems counter-intutitive, building sites for google is bad SEO.
I would suggest you build the menu to be the most simple and usable for your users. Keep in mind the future updates you mention, as if you change your menu structure again, I am sure this wont confuse users - but it is change, and too much change is not good for trust.
Therefore, decide what will be the best option for your user, both now and in the future. Then let this dictate your decision.
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Can anyone recommend a tool that will identify unused and duplicate CSS across an entire site?
Hi all, So far I have found this one: http://unused-css.com/ It looks like it identifies unused, but perhaps not duplicates? It also has a 5,000 page limit and our site is 8,000+ pages....so we really need something that can handle a site larger than their limit. I do have Screaming Frog. Is there a way to use Screaming Frog to locate unused and duplicate CSS? Any recommendations and/or tips would be great. I am also aware of the Firefix extensions, but to my knowledge they will only do one page at a time? Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
How important is w3c validation for mobile sites???
So mobile sites are all the rave, but how many are doing it correctly and with all the different options which is correct or the best? For example I have a guy telling me that the mobile site must validate here http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ or here http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN However I have run many so called mobile sites like nike (m.nike.com) and those built by dudamobiles and all dramatically fail the above tests! Responsive is another key element of web design and the guys at twitter came up with bootstrap, so I ran these sites through the above validators and all have failed. I take this site as an example from ilovebootstrap.com, please note this is not my site but was top of thelist on here. Mobi Ready 2 / 5 - result poor mobile experience Results from google pagespeed Mobile 62 / 100 Desktop 83 / 100 So while it looks good on mobile devices it does not score well If you look at the google site: http://www.howtogomo.com/en-gb/d/why-get-mo/ The case studies listed all fail the validation tests, so my question is is it worth getting our mobile sites validated and will this affect rankings?
Web Design | | iprosoftware0 -
How do I optimize a site designed to be one scrolling page of content?
Our website uses section ID's as its navigation so all the content is on one page. When you click About Us, the page scrolls down to About Us. Products, the page scrolls to Products section, and etc. I am getting crawl errors for meta descriptions but will this go away once the main domain has this info? We just added the meta keywords and description to the header and since the navigation sections use the same page, I assume it will correct the errors. Any other advice on optimizing for site designs like ours would be great. www.theicecubekit.com is the site. Thanks,
Web Design | | bangbang
Chris0 -
Best strategy for multiple internal links
We have a website that has a whole heap of internal links. After re-structuring the footer links to the main categories we are now looking at the best way to display the internal links from each category (approx 20-50 links from each). At present they are simply listed on the corresponding category page, however this doesnt look great so we want to display them in a way that is user friendly and also seo friendly. Any suggestions and examples appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | Silkstream0 -
Does DNS location affect international SEO?
Hi All Smart SEOmozers! I have another dumb question =] I have almost no knowledge on how DNS works and all the website background work. I understand that DNS is the server that translates a domain name to the IP address. Furthermore, I also know that IP Address location or web host location plays a small factor in international SEO. Webhosts usually provide the DNS service as well but for this case ABC Company uses a different domain service, diferent DNS service and different webhost service so things get complicated. So the question, does the location of DNS service we use affect International SEO like how the location of the webhost does. Thank you in advance for your help!
Web Design | | TommyTan0 -
Solutions for too many links on page (Ecommerce)?
Hello Mozzers, Most Ecommerce websites I've come across have four main link sections - Main Nav - About, Contact etc Side Nav - List of Categories + Products Footer - Useful links etc Promotional Area - Promoting Best sellers / Latest products This ends up totalling anything from 200 to 500 links. I was wondering is there a reasonable solution to hide some of the links? Or should I just ignore the warning? Thanks, Dan
Web Design | | Sparkstone0 -
Siloing and navigation menu linking
Still trying to understand siloing and how it relates to displaying links in the navigation menu. I'm working on optimizing a site for a lawyer friend. His site consists of 4 top level pages - index, attorney profile, practice areas, and contact. Then, there are 2 folders that contain all the 2nd-level pages for his 2 practice areas - personal injury and business litigation. The website in question is www(dot)comitzlaw(dot)com. From what I read about siloing before taking the 30-day SEOMoz trial (which I really like so far, by the way), I set the main (left hand) menu up as follows: The 4 top level pages only display the "collapsed" navigation menu, which only links to the index pages for personal injury and business litigation. Go anywhere in personal injury, and all pages link to the "expanded" personal injury navigation (links to auto accidents page, wrongful death, motorcycle accidents, etc.) but the "collapsed" business litigation section and vice versa for business litigation's links to personal injury. I did this because, as I understand, it keeps the practice area links on topic (like in a car sales example where you want a Ford section linking to Ford pages and Chevy pages linking to Chevy pages). Just wondering if anyone thinks I have this set up right. Wondering if the home page should display the "expanded" navigation menu instead or if all top level pages should show the expanded? Appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks.
Web Design | | c2g0 -
Why is site not being indexed by Google, and not showing on a crawl test??
On a site we developed of which .com is forwarded to .net domain, we quit getting crawled by google on about the 20th of Feb. Now when we try to run a crawl test on either url, we get There was an error fetching this page. Error description For some reason the page returned did not describe itself as an html page. It could be possible that the url is serving an image, rss feed, pdf, or xml file of some sort. The crawl tool does not currently report metrics on this type of data. Our other sites are fine and this was up to this date. We took out noodp, noydir today as the only thing we could think of. Site is on WP cms.
Web Design | | RobertFisher0