Should I show and allow following of deep navigation links?
-
Hello mozzers,
I am currently designing an e-commerce system for various companies, my pilot being www.containerpadlocks.co.uk.
I you look on the left in the navigation, you will see only the top level categories are visible (and in the html). Sub categories are only shown if viewing a parent category, or a product in that category/subcategory. My question would be, should I be listing all my subcategories in that navigation (hidden from the user) to allow Google to index my pages easily, and will this promote more PageRank and internal links for my site, or will this just dilute my page juice?
Many Thanks,
James -
Unfortunately you'll have to update your XML sitemap when you add new pages (there are technical ways of automating the update). Unless of course, you use the WordPress plugin - in which case it does this for you automatically. It's a bit of a pain but there are free XML sitemap generators that will reproduce a new file - but I would wait until the site is pretty much complete before creating the first.
As for visualising link juice, take a look at the MozRank of the homepage using the tool bar and then have a look at 1st and 2nd tier. You can see that MozRank splits up evenly between pages (unless skewed by other links). Although if the pages are new and SEOmoz hasn't crawled them yet, then this won't show.
Just remember that if you have 1 internal link on your homepage then all available PageRank will pass through it, the more you have the more diluted this PageRank will be.
-
I see, so only bother to display sub categories on products in those subcategories, or on parent category pages.
I think at the moment google is indexing all my pages, but I will create an xml sitemap to submit to Google for crawling (if I submit a sitemap do they still crawl pages I havent added to the sitemap - for instance a new page i've added since).
Its sometimes difficult to visualise the link juice passing, and how to sculpt it to get the best results.
-
I agree with Nick. Also to help prioritize your subpages other than with sitemaps in the eyes of Google use external linkback anchor texts (whitehat of course)
-
You should definitely not be hiding the sub categories. This could land you with a nasty penalty.
It's a case of PageRank flow and what pages you want to prioritise. If you add more links to the home page, the PageRank that is passed to the deeper pages is weakened. A good rule to follow is to make it possible for a user to reach any page on your website within 3 clicks of the mouse i.e. Category > Sub Category > Product. If it took much longer you may want to think about giving the option of a shorter journey to the user from the home page.
Linking to sub categories from the home page totally depends on your conversion and SEO objectives. Personally, I almost exclusively link to 1st tier pages from the homepage and expand from there - that way I have the most PageRank passing to the pages I want to rank. Deeper pages will still get some juice but generally speaking they're not as important for me.
If you want to allow Google to crawl and index your pages easily - create a HTML sitemap (WordPress plugin does the trick in seconds) and submit your XML sitemap to GWT and BWT.
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
-
Should an internal link open in a new tab or in the same window?
Should an internal link open in a new tab or in the same window? Seems like this is an issue that has never had a definitive answer one way or the other. But I couldn't find any recent articles from reliable sources taking a stance and answering this question. Does anyone know if user engagement metrics (time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit) are impacted if a user clicks a link that opens in a new tab? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NicheSocial0 -
Duplicate content from page links
So for the last month or so I have been going through fixing SEO content issues on our site. One of the biggest issues has been duplicate content with WHMCS. Some have been easy and other have been a nightmare trying to fix. Some of the duplicate content has been the login page when a page requires a login. For example knowledge base article that are only viewable by clients etc. Easily fixed for me as I dont really need them locked down like that. However pages like affiliate.php and pwreset.php that are only linked off of a page. I am unsure how to take care of these types. Here are some pages that are being listed as duplicate: Should this type of stuff be a 301 redirect to cart.php or would that break something. I am guessing that everything should point back to cart.php.
On-Page Optimization | | blueray
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...art.php?a=view
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...php?a=checkout These are the ones that are really weird to me. These are showing as duplicate content but pwreset is only a link of the KB category. It shows up as duplicate many times as does affilliate.php: https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...ebase/16/Email
https://www.bluerayconcepts.com/brcl...16/pwreset.php Any help is overly welcome.0 -
Internal links are not indexed of the website
Some internal links are indexed and some not of the same page of the website, what is the so and what is the reason behind?
On-Page Optimization | | renukishor10 -
Do a bunch of footer internal links help or hurt?
We are an ecommerce site... In days gone by, having a bunch of footer links with your top products / categories was a good idea - as it created a ton of internal links to these products. Now, I am hearing that those links "dilute" the value of our other links on a page - and essentially, there is more harm than good from these. Does anyone know what I am talking about (the olds days) and should we still be doing this? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Ted_Cullen0 -
Follow or nofollow the social links?
I recently seen a site that has delibrately no followed the links to there social sites. The company's Google Plus, Facebook and twitter icons all no followed? I would have thought you would want google to know about these profiles? Whats everyone elses take on this?? shivun
On-Page Optimization | | seohive-2227200 -
Internal Followed Links and Total Internal Links as 1
It is showing Internal Followed Links and Total Internal Links as 1 in OpenSiteExplorer Tool http://www.expresscasket.com/ http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.expresscasket.com Not able to understand and identify the problem and fix it. But when i check in google webmasters tool, it is showing lots of internal links. Does it differ those internal links and your trace of internal links
On-Page Optimization | | expresscasket0 -
Too Many On-Page Links on a Directory type website?
Hi there, I run a website which is a directory therefore there are a lot of On-Page links. If you take a look at the site, www.south-african-hotels.com, you will see there are a number of links on all pages which are completely relevant. I'm not sure what to remove as everything is relevant. The top navigation is available throughout and that alone has 120 links in it to give users easy access to information. Do I ignore the Too many On-Page links suggestion or do I change something? Any suggestions welcome! Thank you in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RyanMackie0 -
How would you handle network header links?
Some companies have a lot of sites covering various topics, for example, http://ninemsn.com.au/. Each category also have dropdown menus where there are more links, taking their pages to well over 100 links. Should these headers be implemented in javascript? Is there a list of best practices somewhere when dealing with a lot of network sites? I'd prefer to reduce the number of links, but sometimes company policies don't allow this. Any suggestions or tips would be helpful.
On-Page Optimization | | bigpond0