SEO Impacts of Mega Menus

[RonnieG]

I came across this thread in WMW today.

Re: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3687528.htm

It has a very interesting discussion on how menu structures could affect your SERPs. I was concerned about my new "mega menu", resulting from a recent customization that implemented an "accordion menu" for my REW website. The functionality of the menu is really slick, but it does add a lot of extra code at the top of the page source, plus lots more internal links and anchor text to each and every page, a potential issue as addressed by this discussion.

My new accordion menu has only been live for a couple of weeks, and I don't see any significant major impacts yet, one way or the other, except that it does seem that Google may be indexing more pages faster than before, which is a good thing, at least so far.

[John Allen]

Ronnie,

According to this tool - seochat.com/seo-tools/site-link-analyzer/, your home page has 324 internal links. I used another tool and found 327. That may be a problem. Google recommends you keeping links per page at a reasonable number. Matt Cutts has said that is around 100.

[jamesww]

I think from what I remember that Matt was refering to external links not internal links. I do not see why the google bot would be unable to tell the difference between the two types of links.

[Jaysonnhs]

I think Matt was talking about outgoing links which could be a combination of internal and external links -

I think the article I was reading was a conversation or question about creating a sitemap (which would be internal links) for a large site - the magic number was about 100.

The Mega Menu conversation was a great read Ronnie - thanks

I think it would depend a great deal on the amount of content you had on the page - code to content or links to content (probably both).

[John Allen]

The 100 links per page is a general rule of thumb. It includes both internal and external links. Even if 324 links does not cause a penalty or trip a filter, it is not optimal for SEO .unless you have very high Page Rank.

Read # 4 at seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru

[Bigtoe]

They tell us to create our sites to enhance the user experience and then turn around and tell us to limit the user experience to accommodate them?

When I am surfing the web looking for something in particular the mega menu sites rock. I don't have to wander around some site looking for something that might not be there. If it is there it should be on or close to the home page.

When it is all said and done I believe in enhancing the user experience, and mega menus help the users. I have 120 links on my homepage and I get compliments all the time about how easy the site is to use. This is all I need to hear.

On the same note, I back out of sites with hover menus. For some reason they annoy me.

[John Allen]

They tell us to create our sites to enhance the user experience and then turn around and tell us to limit the user experience to accommodate them?

I hear what you are saying, but IMO 300+ links is not that friendly for users. It is probably not friendly for Google either.

I'm not sure of the age and background of Ronnie's site. But I did a few queries in Google.

site:http://www.denverhomevalue.com/ shows 1140 pages
site:http://www.denverhomevalue.com/* shows only 10 pages

This could indicate there is a Page Rank distribution problem. Tedster talks about how too many links can be a SEO problem in his post.

Example page - denverhomevalue.com/denver-relocation-home-search.php

This page is linked from the home page, but the Google tool bar is grayed out. Why is it grayed out? Well lets assume that his real home page PR is 2. 2/324= .006. That is a hypothetical page rank passed to each link. If Ronnie only had 100 links, each link would pass .02 PR (2/100). That would be over 3 times the PR juice he is currently passing to each page.

I searched for the first 4 word in the Title, H1 & H2 tags of this page - Denver+Relocation+Home+Search

google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4DMUS_enUS244US244&q=Denver+Rel ocation+Home+Search

It was not in the top 100. More than likely, this page will only show up for a super long tail search.

[RonnieG]

My site, at least the REW IDX part, is fairly new, about 3-1/2 months now. In that time, I have added over 150 community specific IDX search pages, and pages indexed in Google has gone from about 150 to about 1100 today, and the index count keeps going up. In all that time, and even before the accordion menu work, and before I added the REW IDX, the same 10 pages shown by the site:.../* command had the exact same PR, so adding the accordion menu has not affected PR distribution whatsoever, at least not yet.

I don't go out buying or recruiting links. Never have. I know it would help PR, but really don't care about PR as long a I am getting traffic. I get lots of traffic and great results on certain long tail keywords, some related to the words in my domain name, as you would imagine, and others specific to my primary market area communities and services (the 10 pages with PR), especially for specific property types within those communities and others. I really don't care to rank for "Denver" anything. It just happens to be our major market area, but not an area I focus on.

I did express my concerns about potential mega menu SEO impacts to Morgan when we did the accordion menu custom work, and was assured that there should be no negative impacts. So far, despite what the WMW thread seems to indicate, there have been none. We'll see what happens over the next few weeks. I may reduce the number of sub-menu items, but only if I determine that the user experience will not suffer significantly.

[John Allen]

Ronnie,

You have obviously developed a great site and have lots of useful information. I'll be interested to see how this site architecture performs moving forward. If you don't start getting more pages cached for site:/*, you could always do some A/B testing by reducing the navigation vs. page content ratio.

It looks like I'm going to be able to make it up to the conference. I look forward to meeting you.

[thataway61]

Cool - I really like the accordion - and 4 levels deep too. Do you have to maintain the menu seperately with script you add to the menu column, or are you able to maintain through the site backend?

I have custom menus on calcarter1 . point2agent . com, but it requires additional efforts to keep it up. I would like to get those type menus if they work within the REW backend. What's the scoop in detail? Got a link to read up on it?