Left Nav / SEO

[EileenCleary]

We are in the middle of a redesign and would love to get rid of our left navigation.  It's currently full of SEO rich categories and has been the same for 10+ years.  Our programmers think removing the left navigation will have no impact on our SEO.

As SEO's, do you agree with this?

[William.Lau]

You need some sort of navigation, and if you already have a top nav and the left bar is repetitive and doesn't have any real good use other than SEO...I'd say remove it.

If anything too many on-page links is not a good thing.

[jessential]

I find that many visitors do not use sidebar site navigation that much to reach the content they want. You may want to consider that web visitors searched for something first on Google and then probably start reading the page where the term appeared. If links for more information appear directly in the page content they are reading, they seem to like those links rather than prefer navigating the site’s content via the main menu bar or sidebar navigation. Viewers really are driven by the topic that interested them in the first place.

Use tracking analytics to determine just what your pattern may be.