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I am recently initiated to SEO, after I was hired to work in-house at <snip> this website a little less than a year ago. I have learned a ton from WebmasterWorld and I was hoping to get some feedback, because I am suggesting a very large change to our website to try to improve its optimization.
I think there is a big problem with the navigation ("fly out") menu on the left-hand side. I took the Lynx web browser to our website, and I noticed that this menu places 400 Links before any of the content on our site. So the same 400 links (about 800 lines of code) appear at the top of every page.
My idea was that if we change this navigation menu, it would make it easier for a search-engine spider to discern the actual content of a page--especially those lower-level product pages.
We are in the midst of making a massive overhaul to our website, so we don't want to get too bogged down with creating a new menu. But I have suggested that we just replace the navigation menu with simple text links. It would be a less effective navigation technique (although the merits of the fly out are arguable) but the 400+ links that appear at the top of each page would be replaced by just the 15 or so top categories.
Since I'm a newbie, I'm looking for any kind of feedback. I think it's a good idea, but I also have some doubts. What if we make this big change and get rid of our navigation, but we see no noticeable improvements? Is there a good chance that this will help our optimization?
There are a few more items I'm working on to improve optimization, but to me this seems to be the biggest fish and the lowest hanging fruit.
[edited by: engine at 3:40 pm (utc) on Aug. 12, 2009]
[edit reason] No specific sites, thanks. See WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]
I have read that moving the content of a webpage near "the top" is a good move for optimization. Reducing this menu would be a huge step in that regard, because it would be removing about 400 links between "the top" and the page's actual unique content.
Is it important to move the content near the top, or can a search engine spider determine that the 400 links are the same on each page and therefore it should just skip over them for unique content.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Is this the right category for this sort of question?
I'm not much familiar with fly-out menus other than they can come in scripting form and maybe a fancy CSS/HTML model. Let's say it's scripting which is the norm. The bots can go through alot of different types of scripts nowadays but you should be sure that the crawlers can navigate through the fly-out to the various, I think they were product pages. If the SE is having a crawling issue then you'll have to consider either scrapping it or supplementing it with a textual linking structure (that should be done somehow anyway for SEO purposes).
Alright. Here we go. Personally, I'd ditch the fly-out and replace it with the categorical anchor links (textual links) leading to sublevel webpages that list products (I think). This to me seems like your best bet. There, that's my advice for you today.
Good night.
The SE is definitely going through the long list of links and actually getting to the content already. The pages are ranked.
Could it possibly improve the rankings if I dramatically reduced those links, thus making the same content easier to get to?
