Is your navigation causing problems for your SEO? Aaron takes a look at Sox.se in the SEO Clinic and highlights a number of navigation issues, as well as how you can solve the same problems on your own site.
The navigation creates multiple versions of itself in Google’s cache, and pages far from the most important ones show up first. Watch the video below, and if you still want to know more, we go through the main principles of navigation further down.
Think like this when it comes to your navigation
It’s sometimes difficult to know how to start with your menu — which pages should be shown, which ones shouldn’t. Here you’ll get the SEO perspective on navigation. There are of course other perspectives, but if you want your SEO to take off, you need to keep these three points in mind when building your menu.
Indexing
The very first thing we need to look at when it comes to a site’s navigation is whether it’s being indexed correctly. There are several reasons why navigation may not appear properly in Google’s eyes, often related to how it’s rendered. A regular HTML menu, written directly in HTML or generated by PHP or .NET, almost never causes problems. But if you use, for example, a JavaScript framework, it can create quite a few issues.
You can check Google Search Console to see how a page is rendered by Google, or you can use my favorite method: open Google’s text-only cache to read exactly how Google interprets your site. Simply type cache: in front of your site’s name in the browser bar, then select the text-only version.
If your navigation doesn’t appear as a row of links, something is wrong — most likely with the rendering.
Quite often these days, you’ll find multiple different versions of the navigation. This can, for example, be because both the mobile version and the desktop version are output at the same time, but not shown to the visitor. It’s not as big of a problem, but it’s still an issue.
Weighed on a fine scale
The second thing to remember is that the links in your navigation influence how your site will rank in search results. It’s easy to think you should include every single page of your site in the menu for that reason, but nothing could be more wrong.
Since the navigation usually appears on every page of the site, each link is given the same weight, and in general it makes sense to keep the number of links low. Just as with links from one site to another, it’s important to maintain relevance and structure in your navigation. The most important pages on your site need to be reachable from everywhere, but pages that are only relevant within a certain vertical shouldn’t necessarily be there. For example, we recommend not having too many top-level categories and not linking to every subcategory in your navigation. Check out Aaron’s example of a site with a mega menu.
Depth
Based on that, you also want to build depth into your site — and you do that with navigation. Ideally, the top level should only link to top-level categories, but once you go into a main category you’ll want to see subcategories, or the products and pages within that category. For visitors, the exact look doesn’t matter as much, but for Google you want a clear hierarchy. One reason is that it makes it easier for the search engine to understand what is what on your site and which pages should show up in which search results.
Another reason is that there’s a kind of “tax” on links. Only a certain percentage — let’s say 85% of a page’s strength — can be distributed across its links. If there are too many links on one page, that share becomes quite thin. If you can keep the number of links in the navigation lower and only show the most important pages, you’ve already gained a lot. That said, you don’t want to miss including the right pages in your navigation.
Magnus Bråth
Consultant & Adviser
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.