Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
HTML5 Nav Tag Issue - Be Aware
-
In checking my internal links with GWT, it is apparent that links within the nav tag in HTML5 are discounted by Google as "internal links"
This could have major repercussions for designing your internal link structure for SEO purposes.
I was surprised to see this result, as I have never seen it discussed.
Anyone else notice this, or have any alternative views?
-
Two weeks is pretty short time for a new site to get accurate reports from GWT. The back links I found weren't valuable - none with a page authority over 1.
I would secure at least one high quality link and wait a few more weeks.
-
Appears I broke the site... sorry
-
_Could we see the site? _
How long ago did you post the nav element?
The nav bar at top of page has been there since the site went live about two weeks ago. My GWT show only 7 internal links to my home page, but there are 15 pages published
-
Here is how one could test this to be sure:
- Create site on a throw away domain that includes:
- home page
- sub page (containing unique text in title and body)
- orphaned sub page
- Place the nav tag on all pages with links to only the first two pages.
- Add some dummy content but don't create any other links.
- Link to the orphaned page from a decently trusted and ranked page on another site.
- Wait 2-4 weeks.
- Search for the unique string and write a YouMOZ post about your findings.
-
While I have found it does, you could always use a logo link to accomplish this.
-
To be sure I understand; you have a site-wide header ,
<nav>section but you are not seeing the backlinks from all the pages in the GWT internal links report?
(Incidentally, my experience has shown these links do count.)
Could we see the site?
How long ago did you post the nav element?
</nav>
-
To be clear, I believe it is good SEO practice to ensure that every page of a website contains a link to the Home Page (and other key landing pages as befits the site).
Putting a link to the home page WITHIN a nav tag in HTML5 does not accomplish this goal.
-
"I presume your issue is you have external links inside a
<nav>container?"
No - that is not my issue. I have 5 "landing pages" (Home and 2nd tier pages) included in the main nav bar include below my site logo on every page.
I had assumed (incorrectly) that those pages would be internally linked to every page of the website - but they are NOT (at least as far as the internal links shown on GWT)
</nav>
-
This seems reasonable and a good way to ensure the link is allocated correctly.
I presume your issue is you have external links inside a
<nav>container?
Follow up: it appears the specifications do suggest the nav element is for internal links - the element is primarily intended for sections that consist of major navigation blocks. External links are generally not considered major navigation, no?
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/sections.html#the-nav-element
</nav>
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
-
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0 -
Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?
Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Striventa1 -
Layered navigation and hiding nav from user agent
I am trying to deal with the duplicate content issues presented by Magento's layered navigation feature (aka faceted navigation). I installed Amasty's Improved Navigation extension (https://amasty.com/improved-layered-navigation.html) and it offers the option to hide the layered navigation from specific user agents (ie googlebot, bingbot, etc). This seems like cloaking to me and I hesitate to try it, unless hiding faceted navigation from specific user agents is known to be acceptable to Google (white hat practice). Does anyone know if this the case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kyle_M0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Lowercase VS. Uppercase Canonical tags?
Hi MOZ, I was hoping that someone could help shed some light on an issue I'm having with URL structure and the canonical tag. The company I work for is a distributor of electrical products and our E-commerce site is structured so that our URL's (specifically, our product detail page URL's) include a portion (the part #) that is all uppercase (e.g: buy/OEL-Worldwide-Industries/AFW-PG-10-10). The issue is that we have just recently included a canonical tag in all of our product detail pages and the programmer that worked on this project has every canonical tag in lowercase instead of uppercase. Now, in GWT, I'm seeing over 20,000-25,000 "duplicate title tags" or "duplicate descriptions". Is this an issue? Could this issue be resolved by simply changing the canonical tag to reflect the uppercase URL's? I'm not too well versed in canonical tags and would love a little insight. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Is white text on a white background an issue when...?
Hi guys, This question was loosely answered here (http://www.seomoz.org/q/will-google-index-a-site-with-white-text-will-it-give-it-bad-ratings), but I wanted to elaborate on the concern. The issue I have is this, http://www.searchenginexperts.com.au/preview/white-text-white-background-issue Of the four div elements on the page, which; is best practice for SEO? and which of them would not be penalized by google on the grounds of hidden text? The reason I ask is that I have a site that is currently implementing the first div styling, but if you either remove the image OR uncheck the repeat-x (in inspect element) the text is left as white on white. I have added the transparent image on green to prove that having a background colour to back up the tiled image is not always going to work. What can be done in this scenario? Thanks in advance, Dan (From my managers account)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchirP0 -
How to Disallow Tag Pages With Robot.txt
Hi i have a site which i'm dealing with that has tag pages for instant - http://www.domain.com/news/?tag=choice How can i exclude these tag pages (about 20+ being crawled and indexed by the search engines with robot.txt Also sometimes they're created dynamically so i want something which automatically excludes tage pages from being crawled and indexed. Any suggestions? Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0