Comments on: Internal Architecture SEO : Navigation Menu Versus In-Content Links

By: Thien Nhan

Thien Nhan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:51:33 +0000

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By: Momchil Milev

Momchil Milev — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:54:33 +0000

Yeah, great post.
But won’t we make a great mistake taking the main navigation out of the picture. After all it’s so user-friendly and we should optimize for the user, not for search engines?
What are your thoughts about this, Ann, or enyone?
Thanks in advance!

By: Chris Bell

Chris Bell — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:42:25 +0000

Hey,

Thanks for sharing.

I am always on a look for such a good & useful resource.

By: Carrie Hill

Carrie Hill — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:06:50 +0000

Great post Ann –

One thing we have been experimenting with is NOT relying on navigation to SEO a site. Instead we are completely separating our SEO concerns from our navigation. We still build them in CSS, but we dont RELY on them to pass “Juice” so our navigation doesnt have to link to every page on the site – from every page – ICK! The other downfall we run into when trying to use nav to pass “juice” is you cant use great keywords in the nav links for the most part. We work in travel and the phrases are somewhat long tail and a bit long for a navigation menu. “Gulf Shores Vacation Rentals” is too verbose to fit nicely in a navigation – but I can for sure get this in a text link on the page.

Instead we build 2nd and 3rd tier navigation so related pages are linked together via navigation for the user. In a way this is SEO friendly as we’re grouping pages of a site togther that are related.

For most of our SEO concerns we’re relying on contextual links and our sitemap to move juice around the page.

Like I said, we’re experimenting – but it seems to be working quite well. Thanks for the post!

~Carrie

By: Terry Van Horne

Terry Van Horne — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:46:47 +0000

One way to manage the PR inheritance and maximize the value passed is through a navigation menu. If you have only a little to start using only contextual you will have exhausted that quickly. The biggest mistakes SEO make is they get stuck on this idea that they must get IBLs to increase PR. That is a complete fallacy as with a few IBL you can generate a lot of internal PR if the PR managed within the site. The only reason to remove navigation menus is because you think you are decreasing the PR passed with more links on the page. True, but having the nav menu on a few thousand pages sure makes up for a slight savings from eliminating the nav links.

By: Matt Ellsworth

Matt Ellsworth — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:23:39 +0000

good ideas here. we use a combination of both on most sites.

By: BottomTurn

BottomTurn — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:05:40 +0000

I think that you can use the header menu for the top pages, e.g. French wines, and have some words in the content like Bordeaux, which could be located under the index.html/frenchwines/bordeaux.
Your anchor text goes more specific while the links in the menus are more generic.
Ann ?!