Hey there,

I have a question in regard to links going out from my site. On my site I have 2 menus, one on the top part of the site and the other one on the bottom part of the site.
I have about 30 pages on my site and I wanted to know if in some way the fact that I have 2 menus affects the quality of the outbound links I send? Does the PR value I send out is now PR/(60+other outbound links instead of being) PR/(30+other outbound links instead)?
Is it better to take out the menu on the bottom?
Thanks for reading the thread, Eric.

Hiya,

First off 'top' and 'bottom' are hard descriptions to use. If you mean visually then it doesn't matter (though perhaps it will start to matter more with Google's Mozbot on the loose) as it's the placement in the code which matters most. If your site is coded with CSS in such a way that all your content is at the top of the source code and then your navigation elements are included at the bottom but then floated into position then, in fact, both your navigation elements are at the bottom of the page. If none of this makes sense then don't worry. I just seemed to have dived into the details!

Google recommends not having more than 100 links on your site. If you've navigation of 60 + 30 external links then you're awfully near this limit. By 'external link' I mean links to domains other than your own. If these are links to other pages in your domain then they count as internal links.

If you linking to 90 external sites from each of your pages then I would say this a high ratio. Most sites will not do this.

If your menus are form based drop downs with <options> then search engines won't count these as links anyway and it's a moot point.

I suspect the biggest tip you'll get here is not to sweat PageRank. You really are better off not micro-managing your site to worry about where PageRank goes.

Don't do anything just for the search engines. If you have long pages which need navigation elements at the bottom then keep the menu there. If you do link to 90 (or 60) external sites then think long and hard about why you're doing this. If it's just for search engines then I would cut that number down otherwise I'd leave it alone.

Hey there.....

These 30 per menu links are all internal links to my pages. I don't have many more external links. What I wonder is, If I would have only one Manu (and left with 30 internal links only, would it give more value to my external links? The reason I am asking it is because I am about to start doing some link swapping for my site, and would like to give the best value possible to my partners, that people I swap with will get better quality links.

So if all of those links are internal links....it is not going to affect in any way the value of the external links?

Tnx, Eric.

if you want to provide the best value worry more about the quality than the quantity.