Primary Navigation: Keep All Links Or Keep Top Level

[Towelsrus]

Our eCommerce site www.towelsrus.co.uk employees a primary navigation system which we can enable to as many categories or not as we link. If all categories are enabled it adds roughly another 50 to 60 followed links per page giving all pages roughly 150 followed links (Google suggests no more than 100 per page). If I enable just top level navigation then this reduces them all considerably.

Personally from the customer experience I think its better for them all to be visible, however from an SEO perspective and link juice perhaps not.

Thought and opinions much appreciated here.

Thanks

Craig

[LucasGarvin]

My personal opinion here is that user experience is priority #1. Google wants sites to be user friendly before it wants you to optimize it, so that said - I would recommend that you maintain the category navigation in the menu. If you look at various ecommerce websites across the internet, Amazon.com - is one of many, many sites that do the same navigation style as yourself. I think that you're just fine and to continue. It's a great looking website.

Although, looking further, I wonder why your navigation style is like this? http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/bathrobes/catlist_fnct362.htm

Is it just an unchangeable facet of your Ecommerce platform? http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/bathrobes/ or http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/cat362/bathrobes/ or http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/362/bathrobes/ would be a little cleaner. Anyway - my personal opinion. Hope this helps.

Best,

Lucas

PS. Matt has a good blog post for you: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

[lbi-tr]

Hey Craig,

Great Question. I have made a video response for you.

http://youtu.be/iq_IYoF25-8

In Summary

The number of links per page used to matter a whole lot more a couple of years ago when Google wasn't as advanced as it now is. However, it is able to crawl much more deeply and quickly without the same constraints. With this in mind I would recommend that you put on as many links as is necessary for the customer or user to reach their desired goal. Don't worry about link juice or search engines being unable to read the full page. This is very much a thing of the past.

Hope this helps

iq_IYoF25-8

[Towelsrus]

Hi Lucas,

Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. Really appreciated.

In response to the URL structure, this is auto generated by the website, we do not have any control over the URL at all other than it taking the category or product name into account. Unfortunate as it would be nice to have shorter URL's across the site.

Any way, thanks again

[Towelsrus]

Hi,

Thanks for the video, a novelty to say the least. Again I think your response just further justifies the changes i am going to make to the primary nav.

Thanks again.

Regards

Craig