Site Navigation

[znotes]

Hi Mozzers,

I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav.

Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are:

1. Category

ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden

2. Subcat

ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath

3. Family

ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories

Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them.

Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts?

Thanks!

-Zack

[TakeshiYoung]

My personal preference when it comes to navigation is fewer options than too many. The tendency is to want to put everything in there, "just in case", but most users will not even click on a fraction of those links, and you can end up confusing people with too many options.

I would install a click tracker such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale (or use Google in-page analytics) to figure out which links people are actually using, and then remove the ones people aren't clicking on as much. I'm also a big fan of changing the navigation based on what section of the site you are, so when you're on the homepage the navigation might only display the top level categories, but when you drill down it shows you more categories.

As for SEO impact, there are both pros and cons. On the one hand, you reduce the number of links per page (general recommendation is around 100 links per page), but you will no longer be linking to those sub-sub-categories from your home page. My suggestion, as with any large sitewide change, would be to test it. Test removing the links for a week or two, and see if it has any impact on SEO or user metrics. Then decide whether to keep them or leave them based on actual data.

[znotes]

Thanks Takeshi thats good advice, I am going to try and figure out how to test it.