Best Site navigation solution

[Jvalops]

Hi there,

We are getting our website redesigned and would like to know whether to increase the links on our site wide navigation or not.

At the moment we have around 30 links from the navigation. We want to use exploding navigation menu and increase the links to our most important categories. Say if we increase to 60-70 would that be alright. (what will be the highest we can go for)

At the moment categories that get links from navigation are ranking pretty good. If we increase would we loose those rankings.

What will be the pros and cons of increasing navigation links?

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Second question we are also adding fooer links to top 10 categories in the footer. Would this be ok as far as seo and google concerned.

Many Thanks

[StalkerB]

The more link on a page the less value each one carries. For a visualisation check out the images here.

So going from 30 to 80 is obviously going to devalue the authority of each link, however it should mean there are less 'clicks' the bots have to go through to get to all your pages so may increase the number of pages indexed.

Navigation links are (apparently) often recognised by Google Bot anyway, and the links from them are treated differently to links within content.

If it's going to be a better user experience by having these links then I'd definitely go for it as I don't think it will have a big negative impact (I have sites with over 100 nav links and it gets crawled fine and ranks well).

As for the footer links, traditionally links in footers haven't carried much value (having been spammed in theme marketing) but again it should be fine to have.

You could also start coding your page with HTML tags using things like nav and footer, as I anticipate that links and content in these new section types will eventually have SEO implications a little down the line.

[AlanMosley]

The link limit is 100 suggested by matt cutts.

But the more pages that you link from your home page and back to your home pge the better the home page will rank.
if yo havemnt already ready this article and play with the calculator

http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

[StalkerB]

The link limit is 100 suggested by matt cutts.

No it's not The 100 link limit suggestion was removed a while ago, though it's is indeed best not to go wild with it.

But the more pages that you link from your home page and back to your home pge the better the home page will rank.

This isn't really true either. If that were the case I could just make a site with 1,000,000 pages all linking back to the homepage and expect to rank. Whereas actually the only way I'll get value to flow back up to the homepage is to attract links to these 1,000,000 pages from external sites.