"Too Many On-Page Links" Issue

[BethelMedia]

I'm being docked for too many on page links on every page on the site, and I believe it is because the drop down nav has about 130 links in it. It's because we have a few levels of dropdowns, so you can get to any page from the main page.  The site is here - http://www.ibethel.org/

Is what I'm doing just a bad practice and the dropdowns shouldn't give as much information? Or is there something different I should do with the links? Maybe a no-follow on the last tier of dropdown?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Blairr

Can you explain the problem a little more as I can't really see anything wrong with the site.

In your case, the 130 nav links is not the end of the world as you don't have a massive site (category, sub category, product etc). Also, I have done various searches for your title tag and the name of your church and you have great visibility in those results with a 1st  place homepage listing, a google map listing, site links and various other pages so nothing to worry about there.

I also did a search for a snippet of text from one of your deep testimonial pages "but I trust it will be encouraging to all. In March" - what was interesting was that it returned three pages, two of which were from another site called healingherald.org.

So, you may find that these pages are not going to rank so well as this content already exists on another site which is ranking above you for the content.

If you have ranking issues, I would investigate these first and depending on who owns the content either remove these dupe pages from the index or investigate using a canonical URL to the other site (or from the other site to you if it is your content).

Certainly, that is where I would start rather than the navigation as whilst there is a general 100 links a page rule, I would not obsess about  that in the overall hierarchy of this site.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[AlanBleiweiss]

While having all those links in the main nav site-wide isn't necessarily helpful to SEO, I routinely deal with clients that have twice as many links in their drop-downs. So I agree with Marcus - it shouldn't be causing you serious problems.

In addition to Marcus' suggestion, I would recommend a couple things to work on:

1.  Sub-navigation

Like you have in the Staff section http://www.ibethel.org/staff - by adding in sub-navigation (links within that section that appear on each page of that section, and only for those pages) you reinforce content relationships.

2. Referrer Code in URLs - Duplicate Content

You've got links that have their URL appended to track referrer source right on the site.  On the home page - the graphic call-out box (large graphic with 3 smaller graphics to the right of it).  These links point to internal pages but stick

"?referrer=front_page" on the end.  And since your graphics rotate, that means every page linked from this area is generating its own duplicate content conflict.  While some programmers say it's fine, it's not.  You could mitigate this by pushing canonical tags across the entire site, however best practices dictate to eliminate this referrer tracking method completely - Google only uses canonical tags as a signal and not all search engines use it.

3. Site Speed

I ran a couple site speed tests - you've got some serious issues regarding crawl speed.  Your home page images are huge files, and you take a second hit with lots of Javascript file loading times.  - More than one check came in at over 13 seconds - that's not user speed - it's crawlability by search bots.  I highly recommend looking further into that.  If it takes search bots too long to crawl just one single page, some of the links on that page will not be found during any single crawl - and this alone could be part of your problem.  Look to have those graphic images compressed without losing quality.  Look to have your Javascript files  compiled.

4.  Store Issues

Your category pages (http://store.ibethel.org/Childrens-Resources/c236/index.html for example) have no paragraph based descriptions so you're missing out on an important way to properly optimize those category pages for SEO.

5. Content Organization

Also in the store - your Books section organization is a bit messed up. So your breadcrumbs are broken.  For example on this sub-category page http://store.ibethel.org/Books-Books/c173_25/index.html the breadcrumb shows Store Home > Catalog > Books > Books   when it should be Store Home > Books.  Except when I go to the top level "Books" link in the breadcrumbs I get an empty page http://store.ibethel.org/Books/c173/index.html

6. Store Page Titles

In the store, when there's more than one page of products in a category, if I click down to the 2nd or 3rd page in that category, I get the same page Title.  Every page title should be unique, so the simplest way to fix that is to append page titles with the page number.  Like Music   then Music | Page 2  then Music | Page 3  and so on.

7. Stronger Titles

Your page titles in the store could be much stronger - Having a page TItle of "Music" isn't going to allow your site to rank extremely well given how competitive that single word is.  You'd be better off with titles like:

Christian Music | Online Christian Music Downloads

Or for "Childrens Resources" a better page Title might be:

Christian Parenting | Christian Education Reources

8. Store Home Page Duplicate

Both http://store.ibethel.org/index.html and http://store.ibethel.org/ work - so that's duplicate content - have the index.html version set up with a 301 redirect pointing to the http://store.ibethel.org version.

[Marcus_Miller]

Some  great stuff there - thumbs up!

[zharriet]

Marcus and Alan offered some very good advice.

I've visited your website before and had a good user experience.

I'd only add two suggestions.

The Itineraries Tab could be a one-click to the Itineraries landing page. It is easy to locate individual names in the Left Nav and main events/conferences on the page.

Get Google Page Speed for Firefox. Love the wealth of information and fixes it offers. I like to copy and paste the page results into Notepad. You can see scores for each issue--helps prioritize what to fix first.

HTH