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I'm not sure what you mean by "a manufacturer appointed website". Does this mean you have no choice but to maintain a site they provide and where you have no control over it's look, feel, or content?

If you are planning on setting up a new domain and transferring your current domain name to that, what domain name would the existing site have?  A 2nd newly obtained domain name? Or one available through the MFR?

Are you required by the MFR to use their provided site as your primary forward-facing promotional point of contact on the web?

These are all important points to help determine how you proceed.

If you make the new site nofollow, what would you use the new site for?

Having the need to maintain / promote two separate sites is always more challenging than focusing all your efforts on one site and really should be avoided at all costs if possible.

Derek

There are hundreds of factors right, so there's no way to know with 100% certainty in advance what the SEO hit would be with the nav change.  Any single change could have a significant impact, yet if all other core SEO factors are optimal, it might not have any impact at all.  Without testing, no way to know.

Personally I prefer to avoid the possible hit when I recommend nav to clients just because I do want to squeeze out every last ounce of value and honestly, if a site really only has 20 - 30 nav links, it's not such an inconvenience to users to have to click a main nav link and then find the sub-nav in each section as long as it's visually presented well.

If the information provided is highly relevant, that one extra click is not going to hurt the site.

Yeah the clean-up work can be quite intense on some sites.  The fact that we are able to help clients is a big thing on so many levels.   Having the patience to address issues like you describe is one of the most important attributes we can have.

There are many, however one that consistently comes to mind would be the work I have performed for a mesothelioma law firm.  Mesothelioma is one of the most challenging markets imaginable.  It's known for it's cut-throat, black hat, gray hat SEO tactics because every conversion can lead to millions of dollars, and because there are only a couple thousand new potential clients every year.

For the longest time, it was also one of the top targets for adSense sites - every click on an ad could lead to $40, $50 or more for the adSense site owner. The PPC aspect at one point reached a height where each AdWords click cost up to $100.

I was given charge of this particular site in November of 2006.  At the time, the site was buried with it's best placement on the 15th page of Google, and at the time, they had also been completely banned from Yahoo.

It took three months of completely revamping the entire site, and dealing with an ugly inbound link profile to get them onto the 1st page of Google for any critical keyword phrases.  Since that time, with all the changes at Google, it's been a roller coaster, yet we have many many important and valuable phrases on the 1st page of organics at Google, Yahoo and Bing. We use only the purest of white-hat tactics because if Google ever does really go after black hat the way it's used in this particular market, I can be sure my client site won't be harmed.

They flew through last year's MayDay update, the Caffeine update, this year's Panda update and all the smaller ones in between.

And they've been able to help many families who have family members who have been stricken with mesothelioma cancer, who have found my client through organic and PPC methods.

Derek

I encounter this scenario a lot on sites with not 24 but 100 or more links in that drop-down setup.  Here's what I've found.

A) User Experience MAY be improved, however only heat-map and click testing can prove if this is the case or not, and only when you do a/b split testing on the two versions of navigation. Sometimes giving people these choices is only barely helpful unless you also supplement this with additional user experience signals to help someone know where they actually are, especially when they come directly into the middle of the site.

B) From an SEO standpoint, it's not so much a "too many links" issue for distributing individual link value.  It's more a case where if you have all those links on every page of the entire site, at the code level, every page becomes slightly more diluted (all the extra text and words in the code) from a single-page topical focus issue.  You also have more of a duplicate content potential (the top area of the page now has a lot more "content" that's not unique on every page of the site.

The way to address this, if you believe the site-wide drop-down nav is important, is by taking the following action:

1. Be sure you have proper microformat coded breadcrumb navigation directly within the top of the main content area on each page.  This both helps users know more readily where they are in the site's content grouping and topical separation scheme, but also provides reinforced signals to search engines about content relationships that you lose with the top drop-downs.

2. Even with the top drop-downs, it's still beneficial to include section-specific navigation in a sidebar.  When a user has so many choices on every page of the site, it's easy to get lost in knowing which drop-down to use.  Not always, yet can be an issue.  Giving them the alternative that's always visible within each section, and unique to each section reinforces ease of navigation for those who prefer it.  It also communicates to Google topical relationships between all the pages in the section those side navigation links show up in.

3)  You may need to increase the depth of the actual content area descriptive paragraph based unique content.

Where would you see pitfalls?  If you've done good work for multiple clients, and if, as you say, it's all above-board and legitimate opportunities, then I would definitely communicate the possible opportunity to the clients, then let them decide if they want to participate.  If so, there's nothing wrong with this at all.  But only as long as you keep it to legitimate implementation, and make it only one part of a larger effort all around.

Yes - sign up for the Bing Webmaster Tools service - similar to Google Webmaster Tools.  If there are issues or problems Bing encounters that's where you'll get reports on them.

And if you are lacking regarding inbound links pointing to inner pages, you'll see gains in Google and Bing by getting some.  Bing likes to see exact match anchor text links that come from other sites already ranking well in the Bing eco-system. So do some research when finding inbound link sources - to see how they're doing in Bing.

I could tell you to just wait until next month at SMX Advanced - I'm on the "Google Survival tips" panel.  However that wouldn't be very helpful here now would it?

Here's the issue - 1.  If you could find a way to increase site visits by 10% to 20%, and if a reasonable percentage of those were to convert into customers, would that be worth the time and effort to at least consider how to get better rankings in Bing and Yahoo?

Of course there are no hard and fast numbers that can be applied to all sites in every situation, however it's my perspective, and thus why I recommend to clients, that the ability to focus on how to improve Bing rankings not only increases potential customers from a new source, it actually improves Google rankings for deeper content.

Among several tactics, 1 that I find the most simple to check for - how many pages do you have indexed at Google, and how many are showing up in Bing?  Quite often I find clients have submitted sitemap.xml files to Google but not Bing.  Bing actually has a more challenging time discovering pages on a site than Google does, and this one action can sometimes boost not only the total pages Bing indexes, but in turn, increase existing indexed page rankings.

And then there's the (currently unlikely) possibility that Google collapses.  Then where would you be?

Google employees have communicated at various times:

• It's never a good idea to hide content
• It all depends on your intent
• You're free to do what you want and we're free to penalize you if we want

So pick your choice and run with it.  As EGOL suggests, if you try it out, let us know how it works out for you.  Me, I always recommend that clients avoid the display:none method at all costs.  But that's just my preference from a "better safe than sorry" perspective.

If you won't noindex your category pages, my best suggestion is to add unique content to the home page - split out the content so it shows the X most recent article titles & snippets, and separately (to the side of it or above or below it) have unique home page only content - a good couple paragraphs of it should help.

What works for my clients when I help them transition is to do all that's been suggested so far (even considering splitting out the work into phases if at all possible).  But also, it's doing a press release right away, getting social buzz about the new site, and working on adding / building up the content around the core phrases, then link to that new content from the home page.

Then focus on link building efforts to reinforce the new URLs.  And see if you can get any existing link sources to change the URLs in those to the new version links - sending much stronger signals than just 301 redirected links.

If you do the work properly, you should eventually have both the home page and the inner pages show up for your most important phrases.

Good to hear.  Don't forget to set up the 301 Redirect to eventually flush out lingering entries in search engines though

As someone who shot up in the leader board like a rocket over the past few weeks due to Pro Q&A participation, I sure do want a badge!  I'm proud of the recognition I've been getting for providing quality answers, and want people to see that - maybe even click through so they too join in.

Also check opensiteexplorer.org for links to the index.htm version - I see 7 links coming from your blog - feed and pages

Garry

Don't leave it to the canonical process alone.  Definitely set up a 301 redirect.  This is the only way to ensure the best chance that any search engine that currently has the index.htm version in it will eventually clear that out.

Got it in mine and as soon as I did, reported it to tech support as spam.  Got to help keep the moz a spam-free zone!

To add to EGOL's perspective, which I agree with completely, I contacted tech support on this topic the other day - according to Miranda, we're actually supposed to get a thumbs up automatically - not getting one currently is just a minor bug in the system.  So don't feel bad.

On the other hand, I actually don't give myself thumbs up for the reasons you state.  but once it's automatic, I'm not going to mind getting them as it'll be a level field and everyone will get them.

Yeah sorry about that Garry - EGOL helped clarify.

EGOL,

What did I not read in the question that allowed you the ability to provide a recommendation?  We're talking multiple sites.  In unknown markets.  Without any insight into the quality of the on-site SEO or the off-site signals for these sites, right?

Just checking in because if I missed something and was way off in my response, I need to understand how that happened.

Garry,

With all due respect, you're asking a question that is impossible to answer with anything resembling a valid, helpful answer.  SEO is such a complex set of multiple factors, not the least of which is that every site is unique, every specific market is unique and every primary topic within every market has a unique set of circumstances determining why some sites show up higher than others.

Your situation could be due to improper information architecture, topical dilution, lack of off-site authority - or any of a host of other issues, or a combination of all or part of these.

The only way to know is for you to perform a proper audit for each site compared to each competitive landscape. Barring that, any answer you get here would be throwing darts on a wall while wearing a blindfold.

Without any more specific examples, there's just now way to point you in a healthy and wise direction.