How do I reduce internal links & cannibalisation from primiary navigation?

[Towelsrus]

SEOmoz tools is reporting each page on our site containing in excess of 200 internal links mostly from our primary navigation menu which it says is too many.

This also causes cannibalization on the word towels which i would like to avoid if possible.

Is there a way to reduce the number of internal links whilst maintaining a good structure to allow link juice to filter through the site and also reduce cannibalization?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Fraser

Is this your site: www.towelsrus.co.uk?

If so, the simple answer here would be to lose your drop down menus and give that a go. You already have a sub menu on each page once the user clicks through and a breadcrumb so someone can easily anchor themselves within the site should they land on one of these pages.

You then have a sub navigation on the primary category pages that allows people to navigate down to the long tail sub category pages like this one: Egyptain Cotton Hooded Bathrobes - which I am sure does not need to be linked to from every single page.

That should be technically easy enough and will make for a better overall site structure which is still easily spiderable via the sub navs. Equally, the canibalisation is likely not as big an issue as it appears but you will be removing multiple instances of keywords from the nav so that's not going to hurt.

I would give this a read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[Towelsrus]

Hi Marcus,

That's is correct for our site.

I had thought of this and agree its technically the easiest way to deal with this, however I wonder how problematic it would be for the customer if they were trying to navigate say from a product to another category completely, there would be no easy way to do this. I am not convinced that the customer would use the breadcrumb trail to do so.

Maybe there is a way of utilising the primary navigation but limiting the number links from it.

Thanks for your help.

Craig

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Fraser,

taking a quick look again, you have a three tier nav, so you could just simplify it so it is only a two tier nav.

So,

Bed & Bath

• Bath Linen
• Bedroom

Embroidery

• Towels
• Bathrobes
• Kids
• Sports & Spa

The others all seem to just be a single depth anyhow so this could make the main sections of the site easily navigational and you still have your sub navigation which you could then maybe highlight a lttle more in the design.

So, if someone clicked on Towels, we would have the highlighted section and sub nav but if we maybe boxed it and added a header of something like

Browse Towels - Hand Towels

• Bath Towels- etc

My advice would always be to try it, see if it works out for you and improves any metrics you are tracking. Maybe install something like Crazy Egg heatmaps or click tracking so you can see how people are using the current nav (if at all) vs the sub navigation.

Certainly, a sub navigation is a convention, amazon etc use it, so people are used to this way of browsing. Just make sure your design shines a light on what you want people to do and I don't see any usability issues.

Hope this helps! 
Marcus

[Towelsrus]

Hi Marcus.

That sounds like a good Strategy. I am going to look at different structure on our dev site and see what works best overall from both technical and more importantly the customers point of view.

I'll definitely have a look at he apps you mentioned. They seem really interesting.

Once again, many thanks for your advise. Really helpful indeed

Regards

Craig