How can I reduce the number of links on a page and keep the site easy to navigate?

[afmaury]

The SEOmoz Site Crawl indicates that we have too many on page links on over 9,970 pages. This is an ecommerce site with a large number of categories. I have a couple of questions regarding this issue:

1. How important is the "too many on page links" factor to SEO?

2. What are some methods of reducing the number of links when there are a large number of categories? We have main categories with dropdown menus currently and have found that they are used to browse and shop the store.

[RyanKent]

How important is the "too many on page links" factor to SEO?

The "too many links" warning is set to alert you on any page with over 100 links. The importance of this warning depends on your site and SEO goals.

There are two general guidelines I would suggest for evaluating your site:

1. Review your site's analytics reports to determine which links are not used. If users are not using the links, you should highly consider removing the link, or at least making some change to the link which would help users find it. Maybe you increase the font size, change the color or move the location.

2. Understand links control the flow of PR throughout your site. You want to use links to help direct visitors to pages which are more useful for users, or perhaps more profitable for you. You do not want necessarily want to provide a link to every area of your site on each page. The links should be helpful and relevant.

Let's say you have a used car site. You do not want to provide a link to every conceivable category possibility from your home page. If you did you would have hundreds of categories representing every manufacturer, every make, every model, every year, every vehicle type (SUV, pickup truck, economy car, sports car, etc.). It's far too much.

Determine a logical breakdown and keep your links to a minimum. You want to make things easy for users. Putting 200+ links on a page makes it very difficult for users to find what they really want.

One method of reducing links is to not offer all the sub-categories, especially when they drop down to 3rd and 4th tier choices. Another method of reducing links is to combine pages. Perhaps you offer links to "About Us", "Contact Us", "Privacy Policy", etc. You could consider combining several pages into one and thereby reducing your links.

[Sebes]

Adding to Ryans post:
The amount of links is one thing to consider, but also consider the depth of your site, that is: how many clicks does it take to reach any given page. Use a crawler like Xenus link sleuth and crawl your site. You should look into anything over 4 or 5, depending on the amount of pages.

For an ecommerce site i wouldn't worry about the 100 links per page warning, but 200 visible links are too much. Best thing to do is too look at every object of a page (links, images, buttons, badeges etc.) and ask yourself whether it is really necessary or dead weight. Reduce as much as possible.

Nearly forgot to ask you: are you using some sort of social media widget? These little buggers sometimes contain links to tons of sites, thus increasing link count. There used to be an addon for firefox called link grab! which printed out a list of all links on a page.

[afmaury]

Thanks for the replies. No social media widget - just 1 link to our page on a couple of sites.

Most of the links are for the category and sub-category navigation. There are some footer links that could be combined and some tag cloud links that should just be removed.

I am thinking about whether all the sub-category navigation should be removed. The menus could just contain the main categories. Once those are clicked on, the sub-categories on listed anyway.

[RyanKent]

If you are willing to share a link to your site, we can offer a more specific evaluation. Otherwise we are offering vague generalities which may or may not apply to your situation.

[afmaury]

Sure - http://bit.ly/mP3PGv

Not sure about the usual way of sharing links here.

[RyanKent]

I would again suggest reviewing your Analytics to see which links on your page actually receive clicks. Consider removing unused links. A few specifics:

• You have 3 links to your facebook and twitter each. Two links in the upper-right header area, and one in the footer. Perhaps one link to each in the header is enough?

• You offer multiple links to an external site (list-manage1.com) for your mailing list signup. Consider consolidating to a single link and offer this function internally.

• Your footer offers a separate link to Google maps for each location. I see the value of this setup IF the links are actually used. These links appear on every page of your site so if they are not being used, you may wish to remove them.

• The only other area I question is the Nautical Decor & Gifts sub-categories. There are 25 of them. If your analytics shows those categories are all being used, I would keep them. Otherwise, you may wish to consider consolidating some of them, or removing the sub-categories all together and having users click through to the main category page which then offers those sub-categories.

I can't tell for certain but it seems your main focus is clothing, and those gifts are more of an additional offerings type of thing. If that is the case, those 25 links are taking a lot of PR away from the more important areas of your site, as those links are offered on every page.

[afmaury]

Ryan - Thanks for taking a look.

I believe there are just 2 links each to FB and Twitter - one at the top and one at the bottom. I'll make sure that gets down to 1 link each.

The addresses are linked to help fix some local listings. We've had some trouble with incorrect info in Google Places.

That's a good idea about the links in the decor section. Seems like a good compromise to allow most items to be found easily but still eliminate some links.

Thanks again for taking for you help!

[RyanKent]

I believe there are just 2 links each to FB and Twitter - one at the top and one at the bottom.

I noticed in the top there are the "f" and "t" icons which each link to facebook and twitter respectively. In addition, there is the "@NantucketBrand which is a twitter link, and "Facebook instantly" which is a facebook link. It's ok to have these variations if they are helpful and visitors use them. I point them out mainly because they may not be used or there may be confusion as to how they are used compared to the normal "f" and "t' icons.

[afmaury]

Thanks. Forgot about the 2nd Twitter link. The 2nd FB link actually allows a visitor to signup for the email list and actually does get used, but differently than the FB icon.

We removed the subcategory links from the Decor section as well. This cuts down quite a bit on the number of links. Thanks for your suggestions.