Site Navigation

Same link text on all pages

[jdhuk]

I have just finished a new site of 100 pages (unique content) but the layout and text links are the same throughout the site. It makes sense when you look at this site to lay it out this way for the user. A horizontal and vertical nav bar and a drop down box ........

HOME ¦ ABOUT US ¦ CONTACT US ¦ LINK TO US ¦ SITE MAP

MAIN CONTENT
TEXT LINK
TEXT LINK
TEXT LINK
TEXT LINK
TEXT LINK
TEXT LINK
TEXT LINK
so on
so on..
-------------------------------------------------------

Should i leave the text links on the home page but change the rest of the site to buttons?

I'm just concerned about the search engines penalizing the site for to many internal links with the same anchor or even a dup content penalty as the nav bars are identical on each page or will it not matter?

Cheers!

[Stefan]

Don't take this as the gospel truth, but I would say you don't have to worry about that format (text anchors right across) as long as all 100 of your pages have substantial varied content, with different titles. There are a lot of successful sites doing things that way. One reads speculation in the G update threads that repetitive anchor text causes problems, but it's possibly just people grasping at straws.

[caveman]

I tend to agree. I do think that one can go overboard on the anchor text and cause a red flag with excessive kw repetition, but even that I'm not sure of.

Mainly I think that the SE's just don't value those internal links much for ranking help any more. Some, but not much. Just my 2 cents.

[jdhuk]

Thank you for your replies Stefan & Caveman, looks like it will be OK.

[Marcia]

What you don't want is excessive repetition (duplication) of the anchor text links across all the site pages. In other words, all the anchor text running down the left side navigation globally and ALL of it repeated in bottom navigation across the whole site could be overkill.

Speculative? Sure it is. But I did find it has made a difference when I backed off a bit, even though it was so easy just to use PHP includes across the whole sites.

There's more than one engine to consider now, and they may look on things a little differently.