Hello everyone, I was just wondering... what to do if you have an eCommerce like category menu (categories and subcategories in the same page) and there's 70 of them in total. I also have all the brands (64 in total) under the side navigation and again under the content. It's a medium-sized online store and my client wants them as they are. I was just wondering... what do you think is the best seo practice in this case? I have placed the html layout elements in this order: header, content, category navigation, brands with images, text brands, footer. Because I already know that more than 100 links on one page is not a good seo practice, I'm thinking of displaying the brand links with javascript. What do you think about it? Or is there another (better) solution? You can check out the site: www.bmxmagazin.ro
You could rel="nofollow" some of the links if you are worried about having more than 100 links on one page. Personally i thought that you had to be careful not to have more than 100 external links on a webpage. Dont many sitemap pages have 100+ links and they certainly used to be considered good practice.
Google recommends that a good rule of thumb is to never have more than 3 links going to the target page. By that I mean to not have it where the reader clicks more than 3 times to get to the target page.
You could try using JS but it does look like Google is getting better at reading in the JS so you may incur some penalty if they find (need to check the guidelines). nofollow won't work for you as someone suggested but I think you already realize that. I'm not sure I'd agree about the limit of 100 links. Just consider the more popular blogs. They have all the standard nav, blogroll, advertising links, plus each post gets 100+ comments. So logic would suggest that this limit is simply another myth. Even if it's not, it's more likely that Google would do a human review if the flags went up, and when they do they'll see a site that simply has a ton of information so it shouldn't be a problem. Also with the recent addition of the first link priority only the first link will be indexed but with that many links in the content, each page is going to look very similar, and start to look spammy to Google. I'd go to the client and take some control over the work they have asked to be done. They hired you to do a job and it's their job to listen to your advice, not to dictate terms. If they want to do that, then they should be doing the work themselves. You don't go to Ferrari and say I want Pink, I don't care that it's not in the color range, I want Pink. The dealer will show you the door quicker than you can say pink and you should do the same. If they want the best SEO out of their site, and you know how to deliver that, then they should listen to you!