5 replies to this topic

[geoinct]

We are fixing a few drop-down menu systems for clients by having them convert to a search engine friendly CSS based design.

The first one is finally up and running and all the links are getting indexed. Its working great

But now I realized, most clients have tons of links to these drop downs. This client has close to 100 just in the top of page navigation drop-down with all the flyouts.

They have a another page selector a the bottom of the page, a standard Form list drop-down that has close to 50 links; many are duplicates of what’s in the top top of page navigation drop-down

Add this to the other links in their page side navigation area, and the links in the page body and we have well over 200 links

I know the ideal is to keep to less than 100 links on a page.

Is having all these navigation links going to hurt us?

With the growing use of these drop-downs, do search engines, hopefully, favor the links in the body of the page?

[jehochman]

On large sites I put the most important 60, or so, links in the drop downs, and then have some sort of secondary navigation that is shared by groups of pages in particular areas of the site. The user can navigate with the main menu to at least one page in each group, and then use the secondary nav to find the pages within the group. Dan Theis has tested and found that 150 links per page is a hard limit. Google's guidelines state 100, probably to allow wiggle room.

[St0n3y]

It sounds like an awful lot of linking off the page but you really need to do what's best for your visitors. If having all these links is good for usability then keep them. If not then get rid of them and use a more user friendly structure.

[-=seth=-]

some of the links Geoinct mentioned were duplicate, when youre looking at the hard limit do these count as one or is it individualy

[Jill]

Is having all these navigation links going to hurt us?

I wouldn't worry about it unless you're finding that some of those pages aren't getting indexed.

[Randy]

If by harm you mean some sort of too many links penalty, there's nothing to worry about because there is no such penalty. About the worst that may happen is that some of the links may not be seen and thus those pages won't be receiving any link juice.

The greater concern, as has already been mentioned above, is how easy the page and specifically your navigation is for real people to use. On the surface it sounds pretty confusing for users, but that's without seeing the page/site in question. There are certainly ways you can have a lot of links on a page and still have good usability, so this the main concern I'd be focusing on.