It is common practice to put the website navigation bar along the left side of each web page within a site. If you have done any web page building, and if you have reflected at all on the problems of SEO, you have probably recognized that a left nav bar may very well have a negative SEO impact.

Why? Because it is often the first thing read (after the header) by the SE spiders. Most of us who have done any SEO research have concluded that the content at the top of a page (main headline, first few paragraphs, first few links) establishes the theme of the page and tells the spiders what the page is about.

So we assume that most of our optimization efforts should be devoted to the text at the top of the page: put your desired keyword phrase in the main headline (h1), a number of times in the first couple of paragraphs or sentences, and possibly include it in an outbound link to another highly relevant page within your site.

But if you’ve got a navbar before your primary content (in the left column), then chances are you’ve got a bunch of different keywords and outbound links (to other pages in your site) that seriously dilute the focus of your page. This means that you are counting on your page title tag and headline in the header area to do all the heavy SEO lifting.

In his SEO manual called Confidential SEO Secrets Allen Harkleroad emphasizes this point. He says:

“After extensive testing I have discovered that left vertical navigation hinders search engine spiders and dilutes search result ranking.”

And he goes on to cite a 500 website test he ran in which he removed the left navigation bars from 250 of them. He concludes,

“Within a week I saw a substantial gain on the websites that I had removed the left vertical page navigation.”

Andy Jenkins of Stompernet in the video discussed a few posts back also mentions the negative impact of the left navigation bar. His point is slightly different. He points out that using a consistent nav bar thoughout all (or most of) your pages increases the likelihood that the SEs will see pages within your site as duplicate content. His suggestion is to turn the navbar into an image.

But this only partially addresses the “top of the page” SEO issue. Even if you turn it into an image, you will still have a bunch of outbound links right near the top of your page with varying anchor texts. This will still dilute the SEO impact of your page.

I started eliminating left nav bars at least three years ago for exactly this (SEO) reason. But there were some sites where I just assumed it was important to have a left nav bar, simply because that is what people are used to.

In particular, two of our most important retail sites still have left nav bars. As I said, I’ve assumed that putting that nav bar anywhere else on the page would have a negative impact on usability.

This assumption is probably not very well founded. As a test I just moved the left navbar on the home page of one of these sites over to the right site to see how it looks. Frankly I think it looks just as user-friendly that way. You can see it here - portable trade show displays. Tell me if you agree.

In fact, that is the way most blogs are set up, so it’s not like a lot of web users have never seen this arrangement.

So I’ll be re-optimizing this site with the nav bar over on the right side, and see if I can boost our search engine results.

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