Best Navigation for eCommerce and link sculpting Query

[PeteC122]

Dear Experts.

I have a couple of question around eCommerce sites.

We currently do the majority of our business from a handful of products but our site still lists over 1200 products for hire. Some of these items we have never rented out.

1) We are redoing our navigation and thought from a seo point of view, would it be better if we only had our more popular categories on our navigation and kept everything else behind a "more" section?

2) Should we consider no follow, index the categories on our website that we do absolutely no business with. Therefore allowing more internal link equity to flow to the ones that we do business from ?.. I know that Jon Mueller doesn't
encourage link sculpting so to speak but wondered if anyone had any thoughts or experience around this on e-commerce sites?

thanks
Pete

 

[Tiggerito]

I think John Mueller would say for a site with only 1,200 products you will have no crawling issues.

I would focus more on what is good for the user. How can you help them find what they need quickly?

Maybe highlight those popular products/categories on the home page, menus, category pages.

The "more" idea might declutter things and help users. If you implement a show/hide via JavaScript then there should be little negative SEO effect on those less popular pages.

nofollow will not help. It's like throwing away "link juice". It's not going to save it up for anything else.

 

[PeteC122]

Hi Tiggerito,

Many thanks for your assistance. Some very useful points there that I will look into especially with focusing more on the Ux side of things.

One question on the back of what you mention about the No Follow, I was under the impression if some links on a page or navigation were no follow , then the other links on that page (say to the more popular categories/products)
would be getting more "link juice" as it would not be diluted as much? Is that not correct?

Many thanks
Pete

 

[Tiggerito]

In 2009 Google changed their nofollow system so the nofollow links ate their share of PageRank. I've not heard anything since about any change in that.

However, things are not that simple anymore. e.g. There's the reasonable surfer model:

Google's Reasonable Surfer Model Updated

Google has updated the Reasonable Surfer model to include with new claims that have more of a focus on anchor text in links.

www.seobythesea.com

And recently they state that nofollow is a hint and they have added ugc and sponsored as other options:

Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links

Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

webmasters.googleblog.com

I think we are way beyond the days where Google evenly distributed PageRank to every link on a page (the random surfer model).