We've recently added Mega Menu capability to our website, www.displaysense.co.uk, as, like others, seen the growing trend by deep pocket, high profile retail websites adopting them such as Next, B&Q, Marks and Spencer. Plus, with the likes of Mr Guru (Nielsen) saying they are good thing, reported in this blog.

http://econsultancy.com/blog/3543-huge-drop-down-menus-good-for-usability-nielsen

I think they are great because I think our customers aren't browsers- they are searching for something specific, so if I can help them cut out stages by offering them deeper links, I will.

However, our SEO consultancy has raised that Google will no longer love us as we are now showing over 300 links on a page, because of the mega nav and potentially diluting our product pages, seeing less of them being crawled. Its very early days but potentially our PageRank could be affected.

The quoted rule is Google doesn't like you to have any more than 100 links on a page. But when I look at the likes of Argos, who recently introduced their mega menu, they have over 395 links on this page, so how do they avoid this? Or do they bother worrying, as their brand is well known, they don't rely upon SEO etc.

I'd appreciate if anyone could give me their opinion and ideas on potentially helping Google love us. Should I be trying to instruct my templates to load the navigation last or can I ask the search engines to ignore these internal links?

hi, Stephen, Denis,

the '100 link' rule is sort-of true. It's been in Google's webmaster guide for years & Matt Cutts has covered it a few times. The reason behind its addition was google used to only keep the first 100k of pages. That was upped long ago, but they left the recommendation there - I believe - more for quality purposes than anything else.

As Denis says though, I wouldn't worry about it too much (other than monitoring the effect of your new implementation quite closely).

Here are a couple of reasons why:

• 1. Search Engines can tell the difference between sitewide links & page/section-specific links. They'll still be able to understand the structure of your site (in terms of categorisation) through breadcrumbs, etc.
• 2. This is a fairly common technique that sites of all sizes have been using for a few years. As it's so prevalent, search engines will have adapted to it & should be able to take it in their stride.

Finally, a lot of your site is great from an SEO perspective, but there are other issues I'd fix until you have any data to say whether/not the new menus have a negative effect. eg:

• Your homepage title tag isn't really optimised for any keyword
• Your subcategory pages have great content, but their title tags let them down (eg: http://www.displaysense.co.uk/Large-Graphic-Displays-and-Panel-Kits/ )
• Some titles are quite heavily stuffed (eg: http://www.displaysense.co.uk/exhibition-poster-and-literature-stands/ )
• Some individual products show the same title as subcategories (eg: http://www.displaysense.co.uk/Display-Stand-with-A5-Brochure-Holders.c-2763.html )
• Some are optimised for very strange phrases (eg 'table top' here: http://www.displaysense.co.uk/Business-card-holder-Landscape.c-2763.html )

Hope that helps,

dan

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http://www.linkedin.com/in/djbarker

Google is not hunter anymore, its quietly transforming into hunted. Seo has degraded the quality of search very heavily.

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