Reducing Number of Category Links

[JKander]

I am trying to figure out an efficient way to reduce the number of category/subcategory links on the homepage and all pages of my website. There are a couple ideas I've had, and I'd like to hear what you guys think about them (and of course if you have any other ideas). First, there could be drop-down menus for certain categories, so that the subcategories would only appear when hovering the mouse over the category. Two issues I have with this are I'm not sure if those links would still appear to Google as the same as if they weren't in drop-down form (the purpose of reducing the links is primarily for Google), and also this would only be necessary with a couple categories, not all of them. Therefore, if the solution affected all categories, it would not be good.

 

The next idea is that subcategories would only show up on the main category page. This seems like it would work pretty well if it was just applied to a few categories. And if nothing else works, then products could be recategorized to cut down, but that's the least preferable. Look forward to some awesome help from the best osCommerce support on the Web! You guys amaze me time and time again :)

[♥Monika in Germany]

if you want to apply some kind of action to specific categories but not others, easiest would be to add an on/off tag to your categories (new column in database, and added to admin) similar to the products' status. Then add whatever new feature you want to place (hide subcats or what not) and restrict the results by using that new column.

[burt]

In most "drop down" menu's the code behind the menu is made out of all the categories/subcats etc. It is only the display (usually by .css) that makes the subcats appear on mouseover. Google et al wouuld still see all the links.

 

the purpose of reducing the links is primarily for Google

 

Can you explain more about this?

[jaysh4922]

I get the point of reducing the internal links, but wouldn’t the removal of some links sacrifice the ease of navigation? What I’m seeing here is that the rankings do improve, but what impact can it do for the people who actually look at the site? Let’s say you’re in the SEO business and you resell SEO services. If you have a link to some sort of a conversion form which was originally on a certain anchor text, I think that would have made things a lot easier for the user.

[JKander]

The removal of too many links would certainly hurt navigation, but the links we want to remove are for very-infrequently-used categories that people don't visit often. That's why we only want to do this with a couple categories, because doing it to the main ones would hurt navigation. In fact, having a cleaner interface would do well for both our users and search engines, and of course users are the number one priority. And as for why we are removing links for Google, I've read from multiple sources it is not good if your homepage has over 100 links, which ours currently does, so we're trying to cut down.

[♥Monika in Germany]

well ... like I said, the way to go is described above. you could even assign integer numbers, like in sorting contributions, and group the where clauses by that value