Ecommerce web site with too many internal links

[languedoc]

Hi,

We're using Magento CE 1.4.0.1 for our ecommerce web site with a fairly flat navigation system i.e. 9 major categories display across the top menu that when you roll over display 2-20 sub categories (which take you to a groups of similar products) and then individual product pages. The categories and sub categories are available to click on as part of a dynamic Html menu system on each page. Each page also shows a small number of related products. This linking structure seems fairly standard and yet Seomoz throws up the error message, "Too Many On-page links" for most pages on our site. Do I need to really worry about this? Is there much can be done to improve this on an ecommerce web site with a large catalogue of products? I've looked at the Knowledge Base but I don't feel the existing responses adequately address the issue for ecommerce sites.

[alfredopalconit]

i think the recommended 100 links is to make sure your page is as its maximum effeciency. but in the real world, not all sites can maintain 100 links per page. i think what you can do is choose only those links that gives you the most pageviews / clicks and the rest can be placed on the inside page of that category. this means you only need to have the links that you really, really need the visitors to click on from the page.

for search engines, having a sitemap really helps a lot. you might also need to think of adding related categories on all your category pages to you have a good internal linking structure.

hope this helps

[SEMPassion]

Take a close look at your analytics and investigate where visitors are going from your home page.  If they are following diverse paths deep into your sub categories and individual product pages then leave it alone.  If they are predominately going to just the sub categories then you might want to re-think your navigation system.

While SEO is import to drive traffic, remember the main goal is to convert visitors to buyers.

[Dan-Petrovic]

I deal with this problem often. Couple of questions:

1. Do you use faceted navigation in your sidebar?
2. Do you have a superfooter with lost of links?
3. What percentage of your links are in the main nav?
4. How many links are in the content area in average or per page type?

I found that you can safely exceed "100" quoted by Google if your site is strong enough. It was just a number that they made up, obviously the value is not absolute, but I would probably not push it past 150.

[FranckNlemba]

maybe the best solution is to sort pages with high bounce rate and modify the link structure of those pages