Drop Down Menus & SEO?
-
Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO? I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider? Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these? There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.
-
Drop down menus do not typically effect SEO negatively. In fact a properly optimized drop down menu can be beneficial for letting Google know what your site and pages are for. Just a few things to check for:
1. Avoid Java script drop down menus - Use standard HTML or CSS driven drop downs instead.
2. Use live linked text and not images.
3. Use descriptive keyword in your drop down - For example a drop down for shirts use: Red shirt, Blue shirt, etc instead of just Red, Blue.....
4. Keep in mind the First Anchored text rule. Give seniority to your first anchored text link.
5. Make sure your links are absolute link. e.g.http://www.yourdomainname.com/services.htm
6. Use title attribute to describe the page the visitor will be taken to.
-
My developer has created a navigation that has all the links in the HTML, but sublinks are "display:none" until javascript tells it other wise. Does this a cause a problem?
-
It's hard to tell exactly what you mean by dropdown menus ... I am assuming you mean for navigation? It depends on if the dropdowns are formatted so that a spider can read them. You can right click on the page from a browser and then view the source code. You should see URLs for all the pages you link to. If so, you've got no problems! If not, then you should use a different method to navigate.
-
Just some more info:
we used "opencube" to make our menus. Fantastic software.
-
Just adding a few things to this posters questions.
I was always told that Java drop down menus were bad. I made sure my menus were html that could be seen in the code. I read recently that Google is getting better at reading java menus. I am not sure I believe this.
I have menus that open up into a tree structure; refining the search as you go. I find this to be good for the user experience as fewer clicks are required to get where you want to go. I am unsure of the seo downside to my menu structure as it means each of my pages have 170 links.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Alt tag for SEO
What’s are best rules around alt tag images for tagging? is this still relevant for SEO purposes
Web Design | | aplnzoctober180 -
Have an eBook. What is best practice for SEO?
Hello We have a free eBook - its a great resource and great piece of content. It is available to download on our website here - http://re-timer.com/the-product/how-to-sleep-better/ The book is available as a whole or as individual chapters (i.e. http://re-timer.com/app/uploads/2015/07/Chapter8.pdf?b0df38). The PDF chapters appear to be doing well in Google search for certain keywords. I can't measure this in GA though. I would like the eBook to assist the SEO of my website overall. If I create a web page and 'embedded' the PDF into it will Google still crawl this page? At the moment we are also using this to collect email addresses, this is a nice to have and it is OK if people get the eBook without doing this (if they find a chapter in Google they currently don't have to enter their email address). I'm sure lots of people have eBooks now. What is best practice and the best way to use this as a tool to maximise SEO for the whole website (http://re-timer.com)? Thank you! Laura
Web Design | | LauraFalls1 -
Best Practices for Leveraging Long Tail Content & Gated Content
Our B2B site has a lot of of long form content (e.g., transcriptions from presentations and webinars). We'd like to leverage the long tail SEO traffic driven to these pages and convert those visitors to leads. Essentially, we'd like Google to index all this lengthy, keyword-rich content AND we'd like to put up a read gate that requires users to register before viewing the full article. This is a B2B site, and the goal is to generate leads. Some considerations and questions: How much of the content to share before requiring registration? Ask too soon and it's a terrible user experience, give too much away and our business objectives are not met. Design-wise, what are good ways to do this? I notice Moz uses a "teaser" to block Mozinar content, and I've seen modals and blur bars on other sites. Any gotchas that Google doesn't like that we should be aware of? Trying to avoid anything that might seem like cloaking. Is it better to split the content across several pages (split a 10K word doc across 10 URLs and include a read gate on each) or keep to one page? Thank you!
Web Design | | Allie_Williams0 -
Infinite Scroll and SEO - Is it enough to only link to the previous and next page in the pagination?
Hi all, We are implementing an eCommerce site where the results pages of the products will be visibile on one page (always loading new products when you scroll down the page). Now, I have read that the Google spiders cannot "load" new products scrolling down the page, hence the spider only sees the first few products of the results page. Our developer wants to implement a system where a users sees the first products on example.com/products Then scrolling down, he will see new products with the URL changing to example.com/page/2 and so on. Is it enough that we add a pagination link that goes from example.com/products to example.com/page/2 Then another link that goes from example.com/page/2 to example.com/page/3 and so on, so the Google spider can make his way through all the pages? Or is that too much deep linking and the spider wouldn't even crawl all the results pages? Any recommendations how to go about this? Many thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Responsive design to serve different page for IE8 - SEO Implications?
A client is planning on developing a responsive designed website which redirects visitors using IE8 to a static webpage that encourages users to visit in another browser. What are the SEO implications of a server redirect just for IE8 visitors? Possible solutions: would containing a link on the static page to "continue browsing" and give the visitor access to the entire site in IE8 work well? Or should a CSS overlay message appear to IE8 visitors, no redirect, that encourages them to visit in another browser? Or serving a separate stylesheet for IE8 visitors, and not giving a responsive experience be optimal? Any suggestions or thoughts are appreciated. Cheers, Alex
Web Design | | Alex.Weintraub0 -
Penguin 2.0 drop due to poor anchor text?
Hi, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update, and after years of designing my website with SEO in mind, generating unique content for users, and only focusing on relevant websites in my link building strategy, I'm a bit disheartened by the drop in traffic. Having rolled out a new design of my website at the start of April, I suspect that I've accidentally messed up the structure of the website, making my site difficult to crawl, or making Google think that my site is spammy. Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, the number 1 anchor text in the site is "remove all filters" - which is clearly not what I want! The "remove all filters" link on my website appears when my hotels page loads with filters or sorting or availability dates in place - I included that link to make it easy for users to view the complete hotel listing again. An example of this link is towards the top right hand side of this page: http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/agganis-arena-hotels/300382?star=2 With over 6000 venues on my website, this link has the potential to appear thousands of times, and while the anchor text is always "remove all filters", the destination URL will be different depending on the venue the user is looking at. I'm guessing that to Google, this looks VERY spammy indeed!? I tried to make the filtering/sorting/availability less visible to Google's crawl when I designed the site, through the use of forms, jquery and javascript etc., but it does look like the crawl is managing to access these pages and find the "remove all filters" link. What is the best approach to take when a standard "clear all..." type link is required on a listing page, without making the link appear spammy to Google - it's a link which is only in place to benefit the user - not to cause trouble! My final question to you guys is - do you think this one sloppy piece of work could be enough to cause my site to drop significantly following the Penguin 2.0 update, or is it likely to be a bigger problem than this? And if it is probably due to this piece of work, is it likely that solving the problem could result in a prompt rise back up the rankings, or is there going to be a black mark against my website going forward and slow down recovery? Any advice/suggestions will be greatly appreciated, Thanks Mike
Web Design | | mjk260 -
Has anyone had luck doing SEO with a wordpress website built with Parallax?
Has anyone worked with Parallax before? Is it possible and worth it to do SEO on a wordpress site that uses Parallax? I have a friend that is asking. Currently when you navigate their site there is only one URL (home page) and one title tag.
Web Design | | webestate0 -
Anyone used bugherd.com for onsite seo purposes?
Just as the title says, has anyone used bugherd.com for SEO purposes? I was thinking it could be used to show client changes that need to be made regarding the website. Example could be if you are looking at a CRO prospective, you may want to change/add some graphics or text to improve conversions. It seems like a nifty tool to show the changes you want made and to keep track of them. It integrates with basecamp also 🙂
Web Design | | KyleChamp0