Is it better to have a mega menu or one split into categories?

Marketing
1

Hi

From an SEO perspective is it better to have 1 large listed menu - over 100 internal links - or say a much smaller menu split into say 10 categories - so 10 links.

In terms of the user experience, in my case, I have a feeling having 1 large menu is possibly preferable as it reduces the number of clicks the user makes to get to the desired information, but i’d like some advice from an SEO perspective.

Thanks

2

From both usability and SEO perspectives, you’ll probably want some kind of classification and grouping, rather than just having one huge stonking block of 100 links. For people, it will help them to find relevant pages; for search engines, it will help them to classify links.

A good mega-menu design and structure will build in this hierarchy, rather than simply being one long continuous list, so I don’t see any problem with using mega-menus from an SEO point of view, just as long as you’ve got the accessibility and usability aspects sorted.

3

Thanks for the response Stevie.
Yes my mega-menu is categorised by sections so its easy to navigate down, but as there’s so many links (100+) on every page, I was wondering whether this was a bad thing for SEO.

Thanks for the reply

4

If it’s clear that it’s site navigation, and you’ve got the same menu on every page, search engines won’t worry about that at all. They’re well used to sites that have massive navigation, whether it’s a single mega-menu or multi-level nested flyout menus (which will probably look more or less the same in the source code anyway), and they can tell the difference between site navigation and a link farm.