Too many links on hompage - what to do with overloaded main navigation

[marfert]

Hi there,

on my website (http://dealcity.de) I aggregate group shopping deals from Germany.

To obtain a good user experience there is a large main navigation in the header where users can choose the city they are interested in.

The problem is, that the main navigation has 220 links to all cities. Of course this is way to much on a fairly new site like this to have the link juice flown to the sites that are important to us.

What should I do with the main navigation? Is there any way to remove these links from the linkgraph but keep the current user experience?

Best Regards
Markus

[alfredopalconit]

Here are my two recommendations

1. since it is alphabetical, maybe you can only show the popular links, and add a More... link on each letter.

popular links could be

• those with most traffic
• highest revenue

and count in http://www.yellowpipe.com for total link count.

or...

2. If you really need all the links, maybe this will work for you:

you can also use ajax to load the links from the outside

one example is http://webdesigner.ph

the content for each page there are loaded from other pages into a single page

you can verify in http://www.yellowpipe.com , it shows the content outside and links are not counted.

in your case, create 1 page for each letter and you can have as many links are you like, it wont be included in the homepage link count since its loaded outside.

see the source code here http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/ajaxtabscontent/

[Dan-Petrovic]

Another solution would be geo targeting users and pre-setting their location with option to adjust. Use dropdowns or ajax to select cities. I find the top nav a bit strange - not sure if I would use it. Another option would be a prominent search field to give users quick access to their city's deals.

[Guest]

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[bluecubeuk]

I worry about the AJAX option here. Are there any benefits other than for the search engines? In my opinion, if there is an error with the AJAX and it doesn't load, this is very very bad for the person using it.

I seriously doubt that Google can't decipher between a bunch of primary navigation links which are necessary and spammy links.

[CraigBradford]

If it's purely from a user point of view and you don't need Google to crawl the links I have two suggestions:

1 - Do it in JavaScript or some other language that Google can't click, then there is no way Google can see or use the links

2- Alternatively you could always just stick a no-follow on all the navigation links

Not sure if either of the above help, kind of confused at your needs to be honest. If you truely build it in the best interest for the users, the number of links shouldnt be an issue. If it's all city links, why not try grouping them into the country, then into city.

Craig