SEO for big site with lots of categories and subcategories

[katanka]

I have a big informative articles website with lots of categories and subcategories. Most people enter the site through organic google and land on specific article pages. How should I setup my navigation for best SEO practices?

I can make a horizontal navbar with dropdowns for subategories on every page, but won't it have too much links in it? Will my link juice drip away this way?

What about stripping the navbar on the article pages (so not on homepage, categorypages, and subcategorypages) and leaving only the category links (not the subcategory links)? Would that be a good practice?

[freejung]

Generally you don't want to have links to every subcategory on every page. This is the "megamenu" problem that is often caused by dropdown nav, and it creates several problems. One is that it flattens out the flow of link juice in the site, so that every page appears just as important as every other page. Another is that there are simply too many links on each page -- while Google has somewhat relaxed the old 100-links-per-page guideline, it's still not a good idea to have a vast number of links on each page, as that decreases the value of each link.

Perhaps most importantly, this sort of strucure prevents theme siloing. Siloing helps search engines figure out which section of your site is about each topic. If every page links to every other page, there are no sections per se from the SE's point of view.

In most cases it is probably better to include only the category pages in the general nav, and only link to subcategories that are in the same category. That limits the links per page to a reasonable number and creates themed silos that are more likely to rank for their primary themes.

There have been lots of threads on the megamenu problem and information architecture. tedster is an expert on this and hopefully he'll weigh in on this, but I think he'd agree with me.

[tedster]

I completely agree with freejung - that is a very well written summary of the situation.

I gave an information architecture Spotlight Session at PubCon last week, covering just this kind of question in some depth, but even then, not enough depth. This is one of the most challenging parts of building any website, and it's even more challenging for a large website.

There are a lot of factors to weigh, and often a lot of internal political issues to resolve as well within the company. When you do it well, the rest of the work flows quite nicely and the online business grows naturally. When you don't do it well, you often have troubles that just don't go away.

There's an O'Reilly book called Information Architecture - it's up to the third edition now, at least. I strongly encourage getting a copy.

[freejung]

Thanks tedster!

Yeah, it gets complicated in actual practice. What I've found is that there tend to be too many important categories to fit easily into the top level of the nav bar (conventional wisdom is that you don't want more than 7 links on the top level because of how human memory works).

So what I've done in practice is to create "meta-categories" for the top level, with drop-down menus displaying the actual categories. That way you get to have more than 7 categories from a search architecture point of view, while displaying less than 7 meta-categories for the user to select from.

The categories are then divided into subcategories and sub-subcategories, with cross-linking within each category.

I'm sure the site you're talking about is much bigger than the ones I manage, so I'm not sure how well this approach would work for you, but it seems a reasonable solution to the problem of having too many categories.

[katanka]

thanks a lot for your clear respones. A quick solution for me would be to include nofollow links on the subcategory links on the homepage. But I'm afraid Google considers this to be link power sculpting (and, actually, that's what is it). Choices...

[tedster]

You're right. Nofollow is not a solution, either for Google or for your users - and your users should be THE main concern. Happy users actually are a big factor in SEO these days ;)

If you have 400 links, then each one gets 1/400 of the possible PR to vote to its target page. If you put nofollow on 300 of them, there is still no change in the PR vote. Only 1/400 of the total gets used in each followed link, and the rest just evaporates into a black hole. That kills your deep page SEO pretty badly, effectively destroying 75% of the deep ranking power.

[freejung]

Yeah, don't do that.

"Choices" is exactly the point. I think what tedster is getting at is the principle that too many choices is similar to no choice at all. People get overwhelmed. By reducing the number of possible paths off of the homepage, you may actually be helping people find what they want more easily, while also improving your SEO.

[katanka]

ok
thanks for excellent help