Nice looking ecommerce menus with featured product categories - bad for SEO due to duplicate content?

[Coraltoes77]

My ecommerce website has menus which contain 'featured product sub-categories'.  These are shown alongside the other product sub-category links.  Each 'featured product category' includes a link, an image (with link) and some text.

All menu content is visible to search engines.

These menus look nice and probably encourage CTR (not tested!) but are they bad for SEO?

[TranslateMediaLtd]

Are you saying that you have the same link displayed multiple times in your navigation menu? If so, you should probably rel="nofollow" the duplicates.

[Coraltoes77]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, the same link is displayed three times in the navigation menu (so two repeats)!  There are 3 of these featured menu items in total.

I thought the official line from Google was no to nofollows for internal links?  Has this changed?

[TranslateMediaLtd]

I may be relying on out-of-date information. I read about this here

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-situations-where-you-should-use-nofollow-for-linking/6361/

[Everett]

Hello Coraltoes,

I would not rely on a nofollow attribute for those links. Instead, you could approach this in several different ways...

#1. Don't worry about it. If you're talking about an extra few links it really isn't going to make that big of a difference, though the text link should probably be first since it has the best anchor text.

#2. Remove them and rely on sub-navigation in the sidebar for sending people to the "featured" section of each category.

#3. Put the Featured fly-out navigation in javascript, while keeping the rest of the main navigation in HTML/CSS.

#4. Sometimes it is possible to wrap a single href tag around an image AND text, which would cut the superfluous links in half.

If you discuss these options with your developers perhaps some other ideas will come to light as well.

Good luck!

[Coraltoes77]

Thanks, I think I'll just leave these for now as it's only three sub categories that have the 'tripling up' of links.  Appreciate you both taking the time to reply.