Navigation Usability/SEO Dilemma

[limepickle]

I am designing the navigation for a revamp of a site. The company offers 6 products, all of which are available for sale, and 2 of which are ALSO available for rental.

I'm struggling to decide on the best way of going about this, everything I do screams of inconsistency.

My options as I see them are:

• Product 1 : Sale page
• Product 2 : Sale page
• Product 3 : Sale page
• Product 3 : Rental page
• Product 4 : Sale page
• Product 4 : Rental page
• Product 5 : Sale page
• Product 6 : Sale page

or use a split page for the main link, with buy/rent sublinks on dropdowns and on the split page:

• Product 1 : Sale page
• Product 2 : Sale page
• Product 3 : Split page with links to buy/rent
  
  • (dropdown) buy
  • (dropdown) rent
• Product 4 : Split page with links to buy/rent
  
  • (dropdown) buy
  • (dropdown) rent
• Product 5 : Sale page
• Product 6 : Sale page

The actual sales pages are SEO'd for the relevant keywords and phrases, so if a user searches for rental the rental page appears in the serps. I'm thinking that a split page would have to be noindexed, as it is not specific enough to serve as a sales page.

I think the dropdown approach although it seems more logical, seems out of place with the rest of the menu, and also isn't good from a marketing/conversion p.o.v. as it creates extra clicks and increases abandonment.

Can anyone think of a cleverer way of doing this?

[Dan Schulz]

Hmm... god question. I had a couple ideas batting around my head at first, but you just had to go and make me THINK so early in the morning.

Your best option might to be to create a pair of sections - one for sales, and one for rentals. Then put each page in the appropriate section and inter-link them as needed. That way people who are looking to buy don't get bombarded with rental options while those who just want to rent a product don't get slammed with the usual "Buy Me!" sales pitch. Plus, if you need to add more rental products, you can probably just expand the rental section as needed.

And no, I wouldn't no-follow either one. I'd leave them at their defaults, so that people who are specifically searching for either sales or rentals of your products can get to the appropriate pages. Should Google consider them useful enough, they may even get selected as sitelinks too.