I am working on a new project that has 300+ product categories. We want to use a mega drop down to make it possible for people to more easily navigate to the category they want. However, in terms of SEO, is having 300 links at the top of every page going to help/hurt our site?
Depending on the age/trust/PR your site has it’s not really an issue with having that many links on the page…
however…
If they are navigation links (i.e. boilerplate content), then you may want to consider using absolute positioning to have that navigation be part of the footer HTML and then visually appear when requested as part of your main navigation (i’m not sure how you want the UI to work).
Lastly though, do you really think that offering that much navigation is actually going to be “easier” for your visitors to navigate? This is something I would invest in user-testing to determine.
It will be a brand new website, it doesn’t even exist right now. This was my hesitancy to try this right off the bat - Google would basically crawl what could be seen as a link farm at the top of every page as a starting point for this website. For now I may start with just primary category links and no drop downs and do usability testing later with the mega drop downs.
I am not sure what the age might have to do with a menu, but otherwise, I
agree with all that serio said.
Years ago there was a white page floating around regarding PageRank and
link structure. It described two ideal linking methods.
- All pages link to all other pages.
- Homepage links to all pages and all pages link to homepage.
But, sites were smaller in those days and in many cases it’s just no longer
practical to implement #1.
good luck,
Bompa
From a SEO perspective I would agree with seriocomic and think about using an absolutely positioned div for making your navigation appear in the header but be coded into the footer. Better safe than sorry.
From a user perspective I would seriously think about offering the categories to users and the category landing pages letting the user drill down deeper. 300+ options seems like a lot for any user.
300 products and using drop down i don’t think that’s a good idea… try to combine multiple drop down to make it more organize…