Are pages not included in navigation given less "weight"

[LuaMarketing2]

Hi, we recently updated our website and our main navigation was dramatically slimmed down to just three pages and no drop down under those. Yet we have many more important pages, which are linked to once on one of those main three pages. However, will this hurt those other pages because they are not included in navigation (some of which were starting to get good traction in rankings)?
Thanks!

[DirkC]

Hi,

2 things can have an impact on the underlying pages:

1. Your navigation is appearing on all pages - so the pages that are linked to from the navigation will get internal links from all the other pages of your site.
While internal links are less important than external ones, they still play a role in telling Google how important the pages are (=more links is more important). Removing important pages from the navigation will result in a (substantial) lower amount of internal links to these pages

2. If the pages that were previously in the navigation are not linked to from the home page they will be 1 click further away from your homepage (same goes for the underlying pages). How deeper the content is in your site, the less likely it is that it will rank. This might have an impact as well.

So yes, it can have an impact. On the other hand - you also have to keep your visitors in mind. If you had one of these huge dropdown menus before with lots of different links, and now a very clean and logical navigation, it could have a positive impact on the user experience. This would be reflected by things like time on site, bounce rate,...etc and would have a positive effect on rankings.

Just my 2 cents,

Dirk

[donford]

Great answer Dirk and I completely agree.

[EGOL]

I am confident that the pages in your persistent navigation are given more weight by Google.

On each of my sites I have a sidebar that presents a categorized list of links to the important pages that I want everyone to see.  They could be there because I want them to be given attention by google, because I want them to have an opportunity to be seen by every visitor, because they are new and I want to promote them, or because they are important sales pages.  The strategies and categories are different for every site.

If someone lands on your site and sees three links to other pages, what message does that send?   Nuthin' here?   If someone lands on your site and sees a great presentation of inviting topics, what message does that send.  If you want people to see what you have, don't make them dig for it.   If you have great content, get it out there and flaunt it.

Some of my good friends are designers who proselytize the concept of minimalist design.  They think that I should have no more than three to five links on any page. They "tisk tisk" when they look at a site like mine.  But, each of my sites has more traffic than all of theirs combined.