Give Rand Feedback on Moz Analytics Navigation!

[KeriMorgret]

Check out Rand's post on Google+ about our navigation and an idea for exposing more of the features Moz has to offer in our navigation. Please chime in on Google+ and let him know your comments and suggestions. If you don't want to use G+, feel free to comment here.

[Davenport-Tractor]

Rand,

Thanks for the new tools now available in Moz Analytics. These new tools are more easily understandable and flexible than Google analytics.

Only criticism I have is that its a bit confusing about whether Moz is trying to replace the PRO tools with the new Moz Analytics, because it seems to be difficult to link back and forth between Moz Analytics, and the more established PRO tools which we wont be able to live without.

[GregSims]

Rand,

I am a new user to Moz and find the current navigation confusing.  I believe having a NavBar that is the same on the left side of each page would help your website a great deal.  We redesigned our website a few years ago with a consistent NavBar at the top of each website page.  We have received positive feedback from our users as a result.  The vast majority of the time, a user can reach any content on our 2,000+ page website in just two clicks.

There is one negative side effect to this design.  The number of links per page on the website increases dramatically as the NavBar will be added to each page.  I am working with the crawl-test data from our website this evening.  Most of the landing pages of our website have a link count of over 100 links per page.  This is considered by the tool as excessive -- "Too Many On-Page Links".  I understand having a page that contains lists of link after link is bad form and not user friendly.  When we include many links per page to make navigation more friendly for our users, perhaps this should be considered a good design.  I wonder if the search engines do?

I would strongly suggest adding the proposed NavBar to your website.  If we are seeing a trend towards this kind of design, perhaps we need to revisit the "Too Many On-Page Links" metric in crawl-test.  I hope the search engines are able to see that your proposed design is better for users at the expense of having more links per page.

I hope this is helpful, Greg

[KeriMorgret]

I've passed both of these responses on to Rand. Regarding the Too Many Links, that is a warning, and not an error. Dr. Pete wrote a lot about it at http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many and gives some more context.

[randfish]

Thanks - yeah, I can understand the confusion. My hope is that this navigation would be universal, so that it's really easy to transition back and forth between research tools, campaigns in Moz Analytics, and the other subscription features. That said, it will definitely be a test, and we'll learn from the data!

[randfish]

Thanks Greg - definitely helpful to hear your experience and the uplift you saw. Appreciate you sharing that!

Regarding the "too many links per page" - one nice part is that this will only be for logged-in subscribers, so Google won't see it (unless their crawler buys a Moz Analytics account!) :-). And yeah, as Keri said and Dr. Pete has pointed out, 100 links per page is more of warning (kind of a "you're creeping up there,") not an error/problem every time.