How to handle conflicting anchor text in left nav?

[ShawnHerrick]

Our site provides two approaches for customers to locate the products they're looking for: Brand and Category.

Where we're unsure if we're causing confusion for the search engines is when the left navigation filter link anchor text for these pages conflict with one another.

For example, let's say we have a Snazzy Brand Type A widget, Blue, Squared.

The nav links from a category approach could be:

Widgets > Blue > Squared > Snazzy

From the brand approach, we have:

Snazzy > Widgets > Blue > Squared

Where we have the conflict is in the instances of "Snazzy". From a category perspective, we direct customers down to the Snazzy Widgets page at /snazzy-widgets/ (as it's a filter). But from a brand perspective, we direct to the Snazzy brand page at /snazzy/. This means we have two sets of links with the anchor text of "Snazzy" that are going to two completely different pages.

Repeat this across a variety of categories, and you have many instances of "Snazzy" all pointing to different Snazzy-related pages, but not to the Snazzy brand page (/snazzy/, /snazzy-widgets/, /snazzy-whatsits/, etc).

So what's the best way to make sure we communicate the right information to the search engines, while still keeping the customer's browsing experience intact and enjoyable?

Thanks!

[DanDeceuster]

I would create navigation links that put each brand page just one click away from the root domain. Make the anchor text of each link the brand name and have it point to the brand page. This way the brand pages are higher up in your site architecture and hierarchy and should clue Google into which page is most important for the term Snazzy.

Having deep links on very low level pages with links that have Snazzy for anchor text will not influence a search engine as much as links on your home page and in the site's navigation.

[13375auc3]

I believe that it's hard to balance SEO with user experiance.

One thing to keep in mind is the title tag and anchor text.

Make sure that no two pages in your root domain are targetting the same keyword in the title and anchor text. This strategy should make it easier for the search engine to determine which keywords your should be ranking on.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Josh,

We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

[bloggidy]

You could also look into using the new HTML5

<nav>tag. This tells the crawlers that it is specifically a navigation block so it can distinguish the more valuable content from an SEO perspective from the crawler important nav sections. Basically it seems like then the order wouldn't matter as much because you are telling the SEO side of the search engine that it is just navigation.</nav>

[tvinson]

We've had the same problem on one of our client's sites and our solution was to optimize only one of them and change the anchor text for the other.

I wonder if you could achieve the same result by nofollowing the links to the page that is not for search engines.  Would nofollowing an internal link essentially cancel out the anchor text, allowing users to experience the site without messing up SEO?