: Do navigation menu links negatively impact SEO for pages' content? I've always had my doubts about navigation menus effect on SEO. You know, the vertical menus on the top that show in every

@Kevin317

Certain items are bound to same in every page. For example in website of Microsoft company every page has the company name as Microsoft.

In name of not having duplicate content is that wise in one page company name is Microsoft and in other page that is Ficrosoft, and in other page that is Hicrosoft.

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@Sue5673885

Note: this should be a comment, but I cannot comment yet

The only "negative" effects I can think of are:


You will be spreading PR(or link juice) over many pages instead of a few selected ones, especially if you have the same menu over the whole site, you could have some problems in directing the juice where you'd like
The site-links that might show up in the SERP could contain unrelated pages. This is easily fixable though, as you can tell Google if you don't want a page showing up there


For the rest I agree with toomanyairmiles.

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@Cugini213

Do the links dominate the total profile of your page? Overall Google would determine the page is about 'shoes' based on


Your title and meta tags
Your header tags
Your content
Links to the page within the site
Links to the page from external sites


So if even with all of the above, the navigation links dominate, then the issue is more about information architecture than just the page or the navigation.

The navigation should help your visitors navigate. So, if your analytics shows that once visitors are in 'shoes', they really don't want to go to 'shirts', then 'shirts' need not be there at all.

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@Gail5422790

As long as those links are internal to your website, Google should not weight them negatively. I've managed dozens of sites with this kind of setup and no problems.

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@Samaraweera270

Here's a very through discussion on the topic from back in 08, of course by now Google is a completely different animal.

Firstly a very large percentage of the web would have a problem if they were being negatively affected by having drop down menu's, content rollups (look at the right of this page) and fat footers.

Secondly Google has to use navigation aids to index a website, how would the bot get around otherwise? You can't rely 100% on a sitemap being present.

Thirdly, it isn't about the bot's it's about the users.

Drop down menus and the like being bad for SEO/visually disabled people etc is a myth that's been around since the 90's. If the menu is built right and the links exist in the page source and are not #'d then a bot can spider it.

It's generally accepted practice to stay under 100 links on a page, unless the page requires it, but beyond that you needn't worry too much.

//Update

And here's a post from Google's own Matt Cutts confirming the above is true

And here's a diagram showing the number of links on the homepage of the top 98 or so websites from 2009.

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