Should I show and allow following of deep navigation links?

[jcarter]

Hello mozzers,

I am currently designing an e-commerce system for various companies, my pilot being www.containerpadlocks.co.uk.

I you look on the left in the navigation, you will see only the top level categories are visible (and in the html). Sub categories are only shown if viewing a parent category, or a product in that category/subcategory. My question would be, should I be listing all my subcategories in that navigation (hidden from the user) to allow Google to index my pages easily, and will this promote more PageRank and internal links for my site, or will this just dilute my page juice?

Many Thanks,
James

[NickPateman81]

You should definitely not be hiding the sub categories. This could land you with a nasty penalty.

It's a case of PageRank flow and what pages you want to prioritise. If you add more links to the home page, the PageRank that is passed to the deeper pages is weakened. A good rule to follow is to make it possible for a user to reach any page on your website within 3 clicks of the mouse i.e. Category > Sub Category > Product. If it took much longer you may want to think about giving the option of a shorter journey to the user from the home page.

Linking to sub categories from the home page totally depends on your conversion and SEO objectives. Personally, I almost exclusively link to 1st tier pages from the homepage and expand from there - that way I have the most PageRank passing to the pages I want to rank. Deeper pages will still get some juice but generally speaking they're not as important for me.

If you want to allow Google to crawl and index your pages easily - create a HTML sitemap (WordPress plugin does the trick in seconds) and submit your XML sitemap to GWT and BWT.

Hope this helps

[Goetzman]

I agree with Nick. Also to help prioritize your subpages other than with sitemaps in the eyes of Google use external linkback anchor texts (whitehat of course)

[jcarter]

I see, so only bother to display sub categories on products in those subcategories, or on parent category pages.

I think at the moment google is indexing all my pages, but I will create an xml sitemap to submit to Google for crawling (if I submit a sitemap do they still crawl pages I havent added to the sitemap - for instance a new page i've added since).

Its sometimes difficult to visualise the link juice passing, and how to sculpt it to get the best results.

[NickPateman81]

Unfortunately you'll have to update your XML sitemap when you add new pages (there are technical ways of automating the update). Unless of course, you use the WordPress plugin - in which case it does this for you automatically. It's a bit of a pain but there are free XML sitemap generators that will reproduce a new file - but I would wait until the site is pretty much complete before creating the first.

As for visualising link juice, take a look at the MozRank of the homepage using the tool bar and then have a look at 1st and 2nd tier. You can see that MozRank splits up evenly between pages (unless skewed by other links). Although if the pages are new and SEOmoz hasn't crawled them yet, then this won't show.

Just remember that if you have 1 internal link on your homepage then all available PageRank will pass through it, the more you have the more diluted this PageRank will be.