We'd be moving from a standard 3-column layout to a simple search box. We'd keep our category navigation options underneath in order to both maintain our site linking structure and show which types of products we sell. Trouble is, it looks terrible having both a category logo and the accompanying anchor text down there, and the logos are extremely important for our customers to see.
So I'm toying with the idea of eliminating the anchor text from these entirely and just showing the logos (with proper alt and title attributes) instead. However, I'm concerned about it hurting the rankings of our category pages. Keeping these pages' rankings is vital. They're properly optimized for the terms we want, and the rest of the site navigation would remain intact once visitors got past that initial landing page. The anchor text would still be there for the other 350,000ish pages on our site - just not our homepage which is our most-linked page.
This would be a pretty drastic change for us no matter how well it was implemented. We'd be looking at all the angles pretty exhaustively, and the anchor text is just one of many issues to look into before even suggesting this change to the higher-ups. The other possibility would be keeping a sidebar there for navigation, but I'd like to avoid that if possible since it kinda defeats the purpose - I want the category navigation to be secondary because browsing is particularly bad for my niche.
Has anyone toyed with this at all?
Edited by Michael-F, 29 September 2009 - 04:14 PM.
