Too many navigational links
-
Hi there,
I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages.
Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure.1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages.
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?).This is the situation:
- The website is a webshop
- The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here.
Now here's the problem:
- The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option.
But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues.
Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this?
Note: pages have good organic positions and authority.
Thanks a lot.
Marcel
-
Hello Peter,
Thank you for your very clear answer. I was thinking about collecting user behaviour data for this dropdown menu by using Analytics' onclick event trackers. Your idea is way better to use a clickmap or heatmap!
I checked the internal links again and I think there must be a way to cut out some unimportant product categories in the navigation menu and cut out some non-essential footer links.
So, I am not going to change my winning team drastically. I am going to collect some data and I will decide after that what to do with all the links in the dropdown menu.
Once again, thanks for the help. I can move on now.
Marcel
-
When you say 7,000, do you mean that you have 7,000 links on each page or that 7,000 pages show a "too many links" warning? I'm having trouble resolving 7K with your other numbers.
Ultimately, it's a balancing act, as I wrote about a while back:
http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
The more links you have, the less love each page you link to will get. It's not just SEO - it's anything. The more options you give people, typically, the less attention each option will get. So, it's a balancing act. Highlighting more options might get link equity to more places, but it'll be spread thinner. There's really no way in 2013 to get around that.
On the usability side, I'd only ask this (from many prior experiences) - do you have data to back up that these links are very important for visitors? I've found many times that, once we did user testing or click mapping (like Crazy Egg), "essential" secondary navigation links turned out to be rarely used. Even now, many visitors to many site (especially non-technical sites) don't really understand or use dropdowns, especially multi-level ones. Too often, these links are important to management, not the actual visitors. I don't know your audience or your site, so I don't mean to make assumptions, but I'd strongly encourage you to collect that data, if you haven't.
As Miki said, if you're generally ranking well, and if these links really do have user value, then I wouldn't do anything drastic. There may be ways to prune a few non-essential links or maybe fine-tune your information architecture, but slashing away at them may do more harm than good.
-
If you are already enjoying good rankings in the SERPS, I would not worry about this issue. Rather, I would spend your time developing your site more with good content, as well as continuing to try to build high quality links.
-
That's what I thought too. But I'm still affraid search engine spiders can't find their way no more in some time. The worst pages has 305 links on it. And building up the authority costs a lot of money.
Will solving these issues bring a lot of benefits?
-
If "Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option.," AND "pages have good organic positions and authority" - I would not worry about the error - continue to build authority and valuable content and you'll be fine. Look how many internal links Amazon has, and they are doing just fine in the SERPS.
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
-
Competitors link building surely link farming ? but no punishment?
Hi there added a competitors metrics to see what they were doing and to my amazement they seem to have 1000+ links surely this is link farming considering we stay in a very remote area. also why would he be rewarded for this not punished? imgur.com/18dUqNL 18dUqNL 18dUqNL
Technical SEO | | ShauniBROWN2 -
Are bad links the reason for not ranking?
Hello Moz community. I'm looking here for some input from the experts on what could be wrong with a site I'm working on. The site is in Spanish, but I'm sure you'll get the idea. We want to rank the site first page on Google Mexico (www.google.com.mx) for the keyword "refacciones Audi" and some other brands (refacciones = replacement parts would probably be a good translation, just FYI). Now, our page hasn't been completely optimized, so in my mind it's OK not to be on first page yet. However, our main competitor is ranking first page for all the keywords we want to rank for, but when you check their site, you'll find there is hardly any content, no keywords are being used in their content, all pages have the exact same title and meta description, their catalog is in a completely different domain. In short, no SEO whatsoever. Looking at Moz data, our site has a DA of 26, while our competitor's has a 10. They have no external backlinks at all, while we have a few hundred. This leaves me scratching my head: how can a completely non-optimized site outrank us? I decided to check our backlink profile, and a previous SEO agency seems to have built MANY fake blogs with lots of backlinks with rich anchor text. Quite a big percentage of our backlinks are of this kind, so this is the only thing I can think can be affecting our ranking. Will disavowing be our solution? If you'd like to check, our site is: www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx Our competitors' is: www.saferefacciones.com ANY help will be extremely appreciated as I feel a bit lost. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EduardoRuiz1 -
Internal Links
In OSE, it is reporting that i don't have any internal links to my homepage. In the header on every page is my logo in the top left hand corner which links back to my homepage. Shouldn't this mean then that every page should link to the home page? Similarly, internal pages which link from my main nav aren't showing up as having any internal links in OSE. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Too Many On-Page Links - caused by a drop down menu
Many of our e-com sites we build for customers have drop down menus to help the user easily find products without having to click - Example: http://www.customandcommercial.com/ But this then causes the report to trigger too many on page links We do have a site map and a google site map So should I put code in place not to follow the drop down menu link items or leave in place?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
How many links can i do in a day
Hi, I built a niche site yesterday, the domain was 1 week old. What is the safest way to do link building? I.e How many links should i do in order to be in safe? So far, i've concentrated on building my social profile. Like getting as many retweets as possible. Slowly getting facebook likes and added few youtube videos with my link in it. Now i am on to link building. I will only do legit link building methods. Currently i am gonna get 2 press releases. But can you tell me no. of links i must get in a day. PS: The keyword i am competing is highly competitive.
Technical SEO | | Vegit0 -
Anchor links percent
I really don't have a clue about how many internal anchor links are recommended for a page. I think it could be split into anchor text in the article content and also in the whole page. The article content: Only the unique content of this page The whole page: Everthing including menus, sitemap, etc. Does percent really matter? Could an excesive amount of anchor links diminish pagerank in the source page? Can google see an excesive amount of internal content links as spamming? Thanks 🙂 !!
Technical SEO | | heroselohim0 -
WIki Contextual Links
I want to understand what are Wiki Contextual Links and how are they helpful for SEO. I hear google likes them. Is that true?
Technical SEO | | KS__0 -
Spam links on my Backlink Profile
Recently after checking my backlink profile, my site has attracted quite a few spam backlinks with the anchor text written in Asian characters. We don't do any black-hat tactics and have remained clean in our process, as well as not submitted our site to any spam directories, yet we still have these foreign links. Any thoughts on how to get rid of these or stop these from occurring?
Technical SEO | | smilingbunny0