Your site’s internal link structure can help with SEO, or it can hurt it. Too many links in your navigation can cause your site to ‘leak’ PageRank, hurting your ability to pass authority to the pages that need it.
If you haven’t, read the special section on PageRank, first.
Think about how PageRank works. Every additional link on the page reduces the amount of authority (votes) that I can pass via a link. And, on a site with more than 2 pages, the effect cascades down through every layer of the site. One extra link in the footer, for example, adds a link to every single page. So every page passes less authority. It’s like poking holes in a pipeline: Gasoline may still get through, but each hole means less gas gets past that section. Poke 30 holes, and you can see a big difference at the end of the line.
So, clean up your link structure and you can see some nice SEO benefits. Some folks call this ‘PageRank sculpting’.
Consolidating links
The easiest way to make better use of PageRank is to consolidate links: Find similar or related pages that you don’t need to split up. Combine them into a single page with ‘jump’ links, instead.
For example, on the GibbleGibbet site, I’ve got both ‘contact us’ and ‘directions’ in the footer:
Two links. I can probably combine 'em.
I can combine those two links to a single ‘Contact Us’ page, and then fold the content from the Directions page into the Contact Us page:
Consolidating two links into one
It’s like you just closed one hole in that leaky pipeline. More fuel can get through to the end of the line.
The typical pages I like to combine are:
- All the legal stuff: Pull together Terms of Use, Copyright and Privacy into a single page. Use bookmarked/jump links so folks can easily jump up and down the page.
- Directions, Contact Us, Support. Create a single ‘Contact & Support’ page.
- Frequently asked questions. If you don’t have a great FAQ section, put all the questions and answers on a single page. If, on the other hand, you have lots of great keyword-relevant stuff in the FAQ, you may want to keep it split up. Check your opportunity gap and keyword map to see which strategy makes more sense.
Remove useless links
Sites are usually strewn with links they just don’t need. Get rid of them and you’ll see some easy SEO gains.
The shopping cart link
This one’s a pet peeve for me. If the visitor hasn’t put anything in their shopping cart, why is there a link that reads ‘Shopping Cart’ on every single page?!
I don’t know, either.
It’s easy to write a snippet of code that checks to see if the visitor has added anything to their cart. Most shopping carts place a cookie on the visitor’s computer – check for that cookie. If it doesn’t exist, don’t show the ‘shopping cart’ link.
My Account and Login
If I haven’t logged in yet, I can’t look at my account. If I have logged in, I don’t need to see the ‘Login’ link. So swap ‘em out. If the visitor isn’t logged in, don’t show the My Account link. If they have, don’t show the ‘Login’ link.
Any link that requires a login
If you’ve got any links on your site that redirect to a page that reads ‘Please Log In’, you can remove them.
I know what you’re saying: If I hide those links, no one will know that they can join my special coupon savings club by registering!
Yes they will. Because you’ll have a great call to action on your home page, and a single ‘Register’ link that talks about all of the benefits of registration, including your coupon club. You’ll tell folks about the club in e-mails, advertising and when they complete an order.
This approach actually works a lot better. If you put the same ‘Join now!’ link on every page, people may become blind to the offer. If you place it more strategically, it can have a bigger impact.
Advanced: Use an iFrame
If you know how iFrames work, you can hide an entire chunk of your navigation from visiting search spiders. Here’s how:
- Create a separate folder on your site. Call it something like ‘extra_nav’.
- In that folder, create a web page. That web page will just contain the navigation you want to hide. Again, this page should have the navigation you want to hide – nothing more. It should look exactly the way you want it to look on your site.
- On your web site, replace the navigation you want to hide with an iFrame.
- Set the iFrame to have no borders and no scroll bars.
- Put the page you created in step 2 in the iFrame. Voila. Your page should now look exactly the same. The only way to tell you changed it is to look at the code.
- In robots.txt, put a ‘disallow’ command telling search engines to ignore the extra_nav folder. It’ll look something like this (replace ‘extra_nav’ with the actual folder name, if you used a different one):
Disallow: /extra_nav/ - Put a META ROBOTS tag on the navigation page – the page that you’re placing in the iframe. Set the tag to noindex, nofollow:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
Disclaimer, warning and whatnot This whole trick is not exactly, er, in compliance with search engines’ terms of service. Strictly speaking, you’re hiding links from them purely to improve your rankings. So use it at your own risk. Also, if this doesn’t make sense, don’t do it. Screwing it up will do a lot more damage than not doing it at all.
What about ‘nofollow’ or javascript? Or Flash?
Nofollow doesn’t sculpt PageRank. If you ‘nofollow’ a link on a page, the PageRank that would have passed via that link is destroyed. Poof. Evaporated. So you aren’t redirecting or sculping anything – you’re throwing it away.
Search engines are increasingly trying to crawl javascript and the links in javascript. They do a terrible job, but they do tend to sweep in a lot of links. So it won’t work. Plus, it’s only a matter of time before they get it right.
The big three search engines can only barely crawl Flash, it’s true. But they do OK with links. Even some top SEO’s use it for navigation: Bruce Clay’s web site has used Flash for top level navigation for years. I still don’t recommend using Flash for anything where HTML will do the job, but it won’t cloak links, either.