Link Juice Passing Through Headers

[bcarp88]

I understand the concept of linking your pages internally to help  pass juice to one another but it seems to me that the navigation bar with links to your main pages that appear on every page kind of eliminate the linking strategy.

For Example:

At the top of every page is a Home, About, Services, Contact, etc. Do the bots count these as links from each page?

There must be something I'm missing here! Help me out guys!

[JamesNorquay]

Well yes they do count as internal links,

If you have a website with say 20,000 pages you can use anchor text specific titles on the navigation, so it can give you a boost to your "internal link juice". As an example you have a page about "Soccer Boots" you link to that in the title, sure you also have your main product specific pages too and main navigation pages.

What you can also do to supplement your main header navigation is to have a footer navigation.

You must also bare in mind that you do not want to target more than 100 links per page, this is a guide from Google.

Hope this helps.

[bcarp88]

Thats my problem. I'm trying to reduce on page links if anything. It just seems that the link structure of the site would be harmed by this.

Here's my exact problem:

website: www.coolpooltables.com

Im trying to get this link juice flow:

3rd layer pages > Pool Table Services (In Navigation Menu) > Home (In Navigation Menu)

but since the Pool Table Services page is linked in the navigation menu aren't the in-page links pointless since the home page has a link to the services page through the navigation menu as well?

Should I remove the services page from the navigation menu or I am just looking at this the wrong way?

[mediabase]

Hi Bryan, Yes the link juice is pass via headers.These is more explained to you at the below link:

http://www.davecain.co.uk/blog/link-juice-head-jquery

&

http://www.affilorama.com/blog/pardon-me-but-you-seem-to-be-leaking-link-juice

Thanks

[KeriMorgret]

Harald,

The first link is discussing the head tag, not navigation headers.

The second link is three years old, and the information is very out of date and against what we generally advise at SEOmoz.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Bryan,

I'm asking one of our associates who works a lot with ecommerce sites to come over and add some advice to this question. You do seem to have an awful lot of navigation links.

As a side note, you might want to look at your on-site search. I saw that you had barstools with the Purdue logo, but a search for Purdue said there were no matching items. edit: change that to say look at the layout. There's a lot of white space so that the search results were shown below the fold, and I didn't realize there were actually matching products there. You might want to move that up a bit for user experience.

[mediabase]

Hi Bryan, I think that using the navigation bar  helps us to maximize the link juice passed accross each page.

Below link help to solve the query.

http://curiouslittleperson.com/seo-optimize-internal-linking-structure/

[Everett]

Not all links are created equally. This includes many factors, but one of them would be links that are contained within the site template, such as global navigation elements, whether in the header, sidebar or footer. It has been my experience that a link in the navigation does send the message that the page is important, but may not necessarily trump an in-content link with good anchor text.

So to answer your question, no I wouldn't say the in-page links are "pointless". But I would say you can use some more in-content links (as opposed to relying on the catalog and navigation links to pass anchor text), and that your below-the-fold content seems very over-optimized to me.

Rather than listing out links like on this page, you might try to weave them into some content: http://www.coolpooltables.com/categories/Darts/

Also, I would focus less on this kind of stuff and more on getting some useful intro copy on all category pages. I see that you have it for most of the top level categories, but I'd expand that strategy to the next level, such as http://www.coolpooltables.com/categories/foosball/foosball-tables/shelti-foosball-tables.html or http://www.coolpooltables.com/brands/InStroke.html .

Good luck!