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
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
-
Recovering organic traffic and Google rankings post-site-crash
Hi everyone, we had a client's Wordpress website go down about 2 weeks ago and since then organic traffic has basically plummeted. We haven't identified exactly what caused the crash, but it happened twice in one week. We spent a lot of time optimizing the site for organic SEO, improving load times, improving user experience, improving the website content, improving CTR, etc. Then one morning we get a notification from our uptime monitoring service that the site was down, and upon further inspection we believe it may have been compromised. The child theme that the website was using, all of the files were deleted and/or blank. We reverted the website to a previous backup, which fixed the problem. Then, a few days later, the same exact thing happened, only this time the child theme files were missing after the backup was restored. We've since re-installed and reconfigured the child theme, changed all passwords (Wordpress, FTP, hosting, etc.), and we're looking into changing hosting providers in the very near future. The site uses the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which has recently been reported as having some security flaws. Maybe that was the cause of the problem. Regardless, the primary focus right now is to recover the organic traffic and Google rankings that we've worked so hard to improve over the past few months up until this disaster occurred. The client is in a very competitive niche and market, so I'm pretty frustrated that this has happened after we were making such great progress, Since the website went down, organic search traffic has decreased by 50%. The site and all internal pages are loading properly again (and have been since the second time the website went down), but Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting a number of pages as "not found" witht he crawl dates as early as this past weekend. We've marked all errors as "fixed", and also re-submitted the Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools. The website passes the "mobile-friendly" tests, received A and B grades in GTMMetrix (for whatever that's worth), and still has the same original Google Maps rankings as before. The organic traffic, however, and organic rankings on Google have seen a pretty dramatic decrease. Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to recovering a website's authority and organic traffic after it's experienced some downtime?
Web Design | | georgetsn0 -
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Does having a Blog link in the top level navigation provide any better SEO value, or would having it in a footer or top navigation work just as good?
Trying to decide on whether placing a link to the blog in our top level navigation would have a better SEO value than just placing it in top or footer navigation. I have an ecommerce site.
Web Design | | RPD0 -
Site health - webmaster tools
A bit of an odd one. In Webmaster Tools, there's the option to order sites by site health. When we do this our site - http://www.neooptic.com/ - is near the bottom, despite there being little or no crawl errors. Any ideas why this could be happening?
Web Design | | neooptic0 -
We believe we accomplished an SEO Parallax site with a nice balance. Can the MOZ community critique this site from an SEO perspective?
Our goal was to accomplish a site that has parallax scrolling and great onsite optimization. We noticed that most Awwward winning sites www.awwwards.com have great parallax scrolling but no SEO. Can the MOZ community critique this site from an SEO perspective? (Note this site was optimized for Chrome or Firefox. If you are using IE, you will be redirected to the old site.) www.posicionamientowebenbuscadores.com Note the site is in BETA still. It has the following technologies CSS3 HTML5 REsponsive Wordpress Parallax Scrolling Onsite Optimization (SEO) No mobile (ran out of funds...)
Web Design | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Sites went from page 1 to page 40 + in results
Hello all We are looking for any insight we can get as to why all (except 1) of our sites were effected very badly in the rankings by Google since the Panda updates. Several of our sites londonescape.com dublinescape.com and prague, paris, florence, delhi, dubai and a few others (all escape.com urls) have had major drop in their rankings. LondonEscape.net (now.com (changed after rank drop) ), was ranked between 4th & 6th but is now down around 400th and DelhiEscape.net and MunichEscape.com were both number 1 for several years for our main key words We also had two Stay sites number 1 , AmsterdamStay and NewYorkstay both .com ranked number 1 for years , NewYork has dropped to 10th place so far the Amsterdam site has not been effected. We are not really sure what we did wrong. MunichEscape and DelhiEcape should never have been page 1 sites ) just 5 pages and a click thru to main site WorldEscape) but we never did anything to make them number 1. London, NewYork and Amsterdam sites have had regular new content added, all is checked to make sure its original. **Since the rankings drop ** LondonEscape.com site We have redirected the.net to the .com url Added a mountain of new articles and content Redesigned the site / script Got a fair few links removed from sites, any with multiple links to us. A few I have not managed yet to get taken down. So far no result in increased rankings. We contacted Google but they informed us we have NOT had a manual ban imposed on us, we received NO mails from Google informing us we had done anything wrong. We were hoping it would be a 6 month ban but we are way past that now. Anyone any ideas ?
Web Design | | WorldEscape0 -
Competitive Analysis: Links & Keywords
I'm noticing that for some key local search terms our company is not ranking in SERPs as I would expect considering it's size relative to the local sites that are ranking. I subscribed to SEOmoz to get a better understanding of what's going on, and haven't figured it out yet. Our site is higher in almost every metric than the sites we're competing with, but our competition consistently ranks higher in organic results for industry standard keywords. The few metrics we're being outranked in are, "Linking C Blocks" and "Page MozTrust" (we're very close to the leader in MozTrust). Are these two metrics enough to account for our companies poor SERP performance or do I need to be paying attention to something else?
Web Design | | thinkWebstoreSEO0 -
Where is the best place to put reciprocal links on our website?
Where should reciprocal links be placed on our website? Should we create a "Resources" page? Should the page be "hidden" from the public? I know there is a right answer out there! Thank you for your help! Jay
Web Design | | theideapeople0