Drop down navigation and link juice
-
Hi!
We are desperately needing to overhaul our site navigation setup, and we have so many categories that we think our site could really benefit from a drop down navigation similar to what these sites have:
We've held off doing this type of navigation in the past because we were only seeing people use flash to create it and we knew that it wouldn't be good for link juice. But these two sites are using HTML and CSS - which seems like a much better style and good for SEO. Do you agree? We want to make the switch but are worried about losing linking power by nesting our navigation in
- 's and CSS styling.
-
Take a look at the suckerfish dropdowns at htmldog.com
http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/example/
-
Only 1 of those sites has drop-down navigation for me, but I'll assume that the other is representative of what you are referring down.
There are a few ways to do drop down navigation. Some are better than others in terms of SEO. My experience is that a pure CSS method is the most indexable, so I would stick to that. You can easily test if this is the case by disabling all styles when you a view a page (for instance by using the webdeveloper toolbar): A pure css menu will show all the items in plain text.
I've used these extensively for years and am happy to do so. When we first started using the pure css versions of such menus I had concerned that the hidden layers would either hide or devalue the links. We did quite a bit of testing at the time and were happy that this wasn't the case.
That was some time ago, but I do not believe that has changed. Certainly links in such menus are followed and we haven't seen any measurable drop in linkweight being passed.
More importantly though users respond well to them. Such menus provide an inuitive means to breakdown a large number of options in an easily digested manner.
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
-
How not to lose internal link juice?
Hi, I just added some photography content to my site to showcase my skills, specifically 360 virtual tours. I first tried to have those on regular pages and have the 360s in responsive iframes, but it caused usability problems. So I've chosen instead to have a master page with thumbnails that lead to individuals 360's. https://gregmoinephotography.com/360-virtual-tours-hdr-vr-ready/ Links look like that: http://gregmoinephotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/360/maverick-helicopters/ Each pano takes over the whole page. My concern is losing internal link juice as each pano page doesn't link anywhere. Also, external link juice when people start linking to each 360. What should I do to fix that? Should I just link back to the master page in the body & noscript area, even though content won't be visible? Fine with Google? Lack of content problem? Thank you for reading, and for your help!
Technical SEO | | GregMoine0 -
What are the lowest acceptable metrics for a link?
I understand there is a subjective, human factor when deciding to link to/from a site. Nonetheless, what are the lowest Moz or Majestic metrics that are acceptable when building links. At what point do you say this site doesn't have the profile I would want? I am looking to clean up the backlink profile of a site. Also, I would like to set a criteria for building links in the future. I appreciate your thoughts on metrics when it comes to link building.
Technical SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Link Anchor Text
When we have run a Open Site Explorer analysis on our own site, it says that for all our internal links the Link Anchor Text is 'Help with logging in' I am a bit confused as to why it shows that. That text does appear in the header of the page, but is not the first piece of text. Why is it happening on our site?
Technical SEO | | MattAshby
Why do I not see this on other sites?
What affect does this have on our ranking?
What's the best fix? Example page that we ran on Open Site Explorer: www.rightboat.com/search?manufacturer=Beneteau&model=Antares+9.800 -
Page for Link Building
Hello guys, My question is about link building and reciprocal links. Since many directories request a reciprocal link, makes me wonder if is not better to create a unique page in the website only for this kind of links. What do you guys recommend? Thanks in advance, PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
Find broken links in Excel?
Hello, I have a large list of URL's in an excel sheet and I am looking for a way to check them for 404 errors. Please help! Adam
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
Removing links from another site
Hello, Some site that I have never been able to access as it is always down has over 3,000 links to my website. They disappeared the other week and our search queries dramatically improved but now they are back again in Google Webmaster and we have dropped again.I have contacted the site owner and got no response and I have also put in a removal form (though I am not sure this fits for that) and asked Google to remove as they have been duplicating our content also. It was in my pending section but has now disappeared.This links are really damaging our search and the site isnt even there. Do I have to list all 3,000 links in the link removal to Google or is there another way I can go about telling them the issue.Appreciate any help on this
Technical SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
No inbound links. Should I link-build or create new content?
I have a PR4 site with good traffic but the blog is not very popular--the posts do not generate any backlinks and hardly get any traffic. Yet, I continue to kick out a new post every week. Site: http://www.stadriemblems.com/
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
Blog: http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog/ I keep posting content so that Google keeps crawling the site and viewing it as fresh (and yes, I'm posting for my human visitors' benefit too!), but I'm wondering if eventually this will hurt more than help if Google detects all these new pages are not being linked to, and therefore starts viewing the site as low quality and devalues it. So should I: Keep posting Stop posting and build links to the posts Try to promote my blog to get more traffic and hope people link to it Something else or some combination of the above0 -
Do links count if they have no href parameter?
A SEOmoz report indicates that we have a large number of links on our pages, mainly due to an embedded mega-drop down and lots of product display options that are user activated, but otherwise hidden. Most of the links have the paramter href="#", because the links are used in combination with jQuery to trigger actions. It is still possible to trigger the actions without the href parameter, so the question is: Do links without href parameters count towards the total amount of links on the page, since a link without a href parameter is actually an internal page link? Our site (this version of the site has not had empty tags removed): http://emilea.be/
Technical SEO | | Webxtrakt0