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I have a deep level menu on my website (almost 3 level deep - mouse over)

Here I see enter image description here

There are almost more than 1500 links internally to my every page.

  1. Is this really because of the deep menu nagivation, I have on my site. If yes, How to rectify it.

I have given this menu for better accessibility to all my product pages.

UPDATE : THANK YOU GUYS FOR ANSWERING.

I have remove the 2nd tier from the menu and place as a drop down on the sub category page.

enter image description here

enter image description here

**IS THIS RESTRUCTURING OF MY SITE GOOD OR BAD?

Here, I have given DROP-DOWN to Product in Sub category page, where sub category is also a product page**

I have a query related to drop down, the drop down is in tag.

What I want to know is, should I make those drop down options (which is product page) as a link (that might help internal linking of related pages)?

Any thoughts on this?

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  • You never want your navigation that involved. In fact, you really want it quite simple. You will likely want to create topical pages for additional navigation to help direct a user further. It can be a series of questions that help a user know where to go for example. Each navigational 2nd tier could either go to a topic directly or to another page that directs the user further. Otherwise, use search or another tool to help even further. – closetnoc Jun 4 '15 at 14:51
  • @closetnoc thank you, can you check my restructure now? – bizima Jun 4 '15 at 16:06
  • That is basically what I am talking about. It looks good to me. I am not sure how many categories you have and if the number would be too much. If you notice, most large-scale shopping sites make some of the initial categories kind of broad such as home electronics to avoid getting too involved and turning the user off too much. I am not sure you need to think in these terms, I am just mentioning it just in case. – closetnoc Jun 4 '15 at 16:21
  • @closetnoc Thank you, I took your advice and I also did a research for the same. Can you also answer my related query? What I want to know is, should I make those drop down options (which is product page) as a link (that might help internal linking of related pages)? Any thoughts on this? <option> <a href="example.com/xyz" alt="alt text" title="abcxyz">anchor text</a> </option> – bizima Jun 4 '15 at 16:28
  • Well, Matt Cutts has said you don't really want more than 100 links on a page, however I know many sites that use hundreds to thousands, and some of these are the best ranking sites around... Check out wowhead.com for example.... – Simon Hayter♦ Jun 4 '15 at 16:28
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So if it's a 1600 links menu, or even hundreds of links one, I would not rectify it. I would reconsider the navigation from the ground-up.

It's too overwhelming. You give people too many choices, and possibly hurt their user experience because of paradox of choice and difficulty to retrieve content.

To do so, just think of what users want when they land on a page, your main categories, then which are your top landing pages or categories with analytics software. You can even use in-page analysis for understanding effectively if people actually click on your menu.

This is an old post of Matt Cutts written in 2009 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

Take this as still true

So how might Google treat pages with well over a hundred links? If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links. At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience.

Here a video of Cutts talking about tag clouds. They are similar to big menus, because they're just list of links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg

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While I agree lucgenti is correct, I feel there can be minor exceptions.

If the links are just of small preview photos leading into detailed pages and the number of characters in the text in the links is very small, then I'd go for extensive links, but even then, I'd add more options to paginate those links.

On my site I give options for people to view either 100, 200, or 500 picture previews per page for maximum compatibility and user satisfaction, and the text of each link is just a number. Funny thing is at one point as I was debugging my site months ago, the options to view 200 and 500 picture previews per page were not working and I had complaints as a result.

Also, another way a ton of links are acceptable is if you were doing something else with a grid such as some interactive crossword puzzle where each clickable area in a link is defined as a small box, enough to hold one letter.

But in 99% of the cases, I'd categorize the links and put them on the appropriate pages and keep the link count on each page to under 100 if possible.

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  • True. But a megamenu is present in every page of a website. So every page has tons of links. Same links, same keywords, etc. – lucgenti Jun 4 '15 at 15:40
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    @lucgenti This is an important point you made. The menu is likely sapping the search potential for each page by overwhelming it with non-relevant terms. If this high up in the HTML code, then you have a larger problem. Even using the nav tag and nav class may not help you much. At the very least use the nav tag, nav class, and put the code low in the HTML to minimize any effect. – closetnoc Jun 4 '15 at 15:54
  • Good points and I'd try modifying the code so that the code text ratio is at least 15%. This means 15% of the contents of the HTML file need to be text that's printed on the browsers screen, and thousands of links (especially with long URLs and little text) will hurt that objective due to the coding required to form a link. – Mike -- No longer here Jun 4 '15 at 17:10

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