Does using a hash menu system drive SEO power to my sub-pages?
-
My website (a large professional one) uses a interesting menu system. When a user hovers over text (which is not clickable), then a larger sub-menu appears on the screen, when they hover over something else, then this sub-menu changes or disappears. This menu is driven by a hash(#), which makes me wonder. I this giving my sub-pages an SEO kick?
Or... is there another way that we should be doing this in order to get that SEO kick?
-
I think we'll need to see the site in order to provide any meaningful and specific advice in this case.
-
I've never used a CMS that does anchor links by default, so unfortunately I won't be of much help in offering a solution. I would try to fix this in the back-end of the CMS though, as it's not going to help SEO in anyway if all your content lives at the same root URL. You should aim for one (indexable) URL for each piece of content as recommended here by John Mueller.
-
Unfortunately my site has implemented the menu system across the site this way.
Does the sub-menu items (which are links that appear on hover) get an SEO boost?
Any ideas on how to 'correct' this menu system to optimize for SEO? Basically... is there anything I can do to convert this implementation into something that would be optimized appropriately?
-
You should avoid using anchor links (hash URLs) as primary navigation or URL structure. Google won't index them individually, since they're technically just another part of the same root page.
They can serve a purpose for usability, but this case isn't one of them.
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
-
Keywords going to Subdomain instead of targeted page(general landing page)
Why are some of my keywords going to subdomains instead of the more general/targeted landing page. For example, on my ecommerce website, the keyword 'tempurpedic' is directing to the subdomain URL of a specific tempurpedic product page instead of the general landing page. The product has a page authority of 15 and the Tempurpedic landing pages with all the products has an authority of 31. I have also noticed that my 'furniture stores in houston' keyword directs to my "occasional tables" URL! instead of a the much more targeted homepage. Is there something I am missing here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nat88han0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Content with Used Car Listings Database: Robots.txt vs Noindex vs Hash URLs (Help!)
Hi Guys, We have developed a plugin that allows us to display used vehicle listings from a centralized, third-party database. The functionality works similar to autotrader.com or cargurus.com, and there are two primary components: 1. Vehicle Listings Pages: this is the page where the user can use various filters to narrow the vehicle listings to find the vehicle they want.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | browndoginteractive
2. Vehicle Details Pages: this is the page where the user actually views the details about said vehicle. It is served up via Ajax, in a dialog box on the Vehicle Listings Pages. Example functionality: http://screencast.com/t/kArKm4tBo The Vehicle Listings pages (#1), we do want indexed and to rank. These pages have additional content besides the vehicle listings themselves, and those results are randomized or sliced/diced in different and unique ways. They're also updated twice per day. We do not want to index #2, the Vehicle Details pages, as these pages appear and disappear all of the time, based on dealer inventory, and don't have much value in the SERPs. Additionally, other sites such as autotrader.com, Yahoo Autos, and others draw from this same database, so we're worried about duplicate content. For instance, entering a snippet of dealer-provided content for one specific listing that Google indexed yielded 8,200+ results: Example Google query. We did not originally think that Google would even be able to index these pages, as they are served up via Ajax. However, it seems we were wrong, as Google has already begun indexing them. Not only is duplicate content an issue, but these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly! If a user were to navigate to the url directly, from the SERPs, they would see a page that isn't styled right. Now we have to determine the right solution to keep these pages out of the index: robots.txt, noindex meta tags, or hash (#) internal links. Robots.txt Advantages: Super easy to implement Conserves crawl budget for large sites Ensures crawler doesn't get stuck. After all, if our website only has 500 pages that we really want indexed and ranked, and vehicle details pages constitute another 1,000,000,000 pages, it doesn't seem to make sense to make Googlebot crawl all of those pages. Robots.txt Disadvantages: Doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, as we've seen, probably because there are internal links to these pages. We could nofollow these internal links, thereby minimizing indexation, but this would lead to each 10-25 noindex internal links on each Vehicle Listings page (will Google think we're pagerank sculpting?) Noindex Advantages: Does prevent vehicle details pages from being indexed Allows ALL pages to be crawled (advantage?) Noindex Disadvantages: Difficult to implement (vehicle details pages are served using ajax, so they have no tag. Solution would have to involve X-Robots-Tag HTTP header and Apache, sending a noindex tag based on querystring variables, similar to this stackoverflow solution. This means the plugin functionality is no longer self-contained, and some hosts may not allow these types of Apache rewrites (as I understand it) Forces (or rather allows) Googlebot to crawl hundreds of thousands of noindex pages. I say "force" because of the crawl budget required. Crawler could get stuck/lost in so many pages, and my not like crawling a site with 1,000,000,000 pages, 99.9% of which are noindexed. Cannot be used in conjunction with robots.txt. After all, crawler never reads noindex meta tag if blocked by robots.txt Hash (#) URL Advantages: By using for links on Vehicle Listing pages to Vehicle Details pages (such as "Contact Seller" buttons), coupled with Javascript, crawler won't be able to follow/crawl these links. Best of both worlds: crawl budget isn't overtaxed by thousands of noindex pages, and internal links used to index robots.txt-disallowed pages are gone. Accomplishes same thing as "nofollowing" these links, but without looking like pagerank sculpting (?) Does not require complex Apache stuff Hash (#) URL Disdvantages: Is Google suspicious of sites with (some) internal links structured like this, since they can't crawl/follow them? Initially, we implemented robots.txt--the "sledgehammer solution." We figured that we'd have a happier crawler this way, as it wouldn't have to crawl zillions of partially duplicate vehicle details pages, and we wanted it to be like these pages didn't even exist. However, Google seems to be indexing many of these pages anyway, probably based on internal links pointing to them. We could nofollow the links pointing to these pages, but we don't want it to look like we're pagerank sculpting or something like that. If we implement noindex on these pages (and doing so is a difficult task itself), then we will be certain these pages aren't indexed. However, to do so we will have to remove the robots.txt disallowal, in order to let the crawler read the noindex tag on these pages. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me to make googlebot crawl zillions of vehicle details pages, all of which are noindexed, and it could easily get stuck/lost/etc. It seems like a waste of resources, and in some shadowy way bad for SEO. My developers are pushing for the third solution: using the hash URLs. This works on all hosts and keeps all functionality in the plugin self-contained (unlike noindex), and conserves crawl budget while keeping vehicle details page out of the index (unlike robots.txt). But I don't want Google to slap us 6-12 months from now because it doesn't like links like these (). Any thoughts or advice you guys have would be hugely appreciated, as I've been going in circles, circles, circles on this for a couple of days now. Also, I can provide a test site URL if you'd like to see the functionality in action.0 -
SEO structure question: Better to add similar (but distinct) content to multiple unique pages or make one unique page?
Not sure which approach would be more SEO ranking friendly? As we are a music store, we do instrument repairs on all instruments. Currently, I don't have much of any content about our repairs on our website... so I'm considering a couple different approaches of adding this content: Let's take Trumpet Repair for example: 1. I can auto write to the HTML body (say, at the end of the body) of our 20 Trumpets (each having their own page) we have for sale on our site, the verbiage of all repairs, services, rates, and other repair related detail. In my mind, the effect of this may be that: This added information does uniquely pertain to Trumpets only (excludes all other instrument repair info), which Google likes... but it would be duplicate Trumpet repair information over 20 pages.... which Google may not like? 2. Or I could auto write the repair details to the Trumpet's Category Page - either in the Body, Header, or Footer. This definitely reduces the redundancy of the repeating Trumpet repair info per Trumpet page, but it also reduces each Trumpet pages content depth... so I'm not sure which out weighs the other? 3. Write it to both category page & individual pages? Possibly valuable because the information is anchoring all around itself and supporting... or is that super duplication? 4. Of course, create a category dedicated to repairs then add a subcategory for each instrument and have the repair info there be completely unique to that page...- then in the body of each 20 Trumpets, tag an internal link to Trumpet Repair? Any suggestions greatly appreciated? Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google?
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index in order to avoid the duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelNewman1 -
Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
I've just started working with a client and have been surprised to find that every page of their site (using Concrete5 CMS) has a rel=canonical pointing to their home page. I'm feeling really dumb, because this seems like a fatal flaw which would keep Google from ranking any page other than the home page... but when I look at Google Analytics, Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, using Secondary Dimension = Source, it seems that Google is delivering users to numerous pages on their site. Can anyone help me out?! Thanks very much!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Optimize root domain or a page in a sub directory?
Hi My root domain is already optimized for keywords, i would say branded keywords, which i do not really need, as the traffic from these does not give me any revenue ( mostly consists of our employees/returning visitors). Now i have run on page optimization for set of keywords for root domain which i like and got good grades (hurray!). But yet my website does not show up on search engines for those keywords. I have got pretty good link building done to my root domain but this is not done for all keywords (but done for branded keywords). It just happened, please do not ask why. So i decided to optimize inside pages in sub directory with new set of keywords i like. Starting with link building, giving anchor text on various other website linking to this particular page. These pages are not ranked in top 50 in google. Is that a good practice? or I would not need those branded keywords, hence should I re-optimize my root domain to suite my new keywords by giving less preference to branded keywords? Is this a good practice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0 -
Pricing Page vs. No Pricing Page
There are many SEO sites out there that have an SEO Pricing page, IMO this is BS. A SEO company cannot give every person the same quote for diffirent keywords. However, this is something we are currently debating. I don't want a pricing page, because it's a page full of lies. My coworker thinks it is a good idea, and that users look for a pricing page. Suggestions? If I had to build one (which I am debating against) is it better to just explain why pricing can be tricky? or to BS them like most sites do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0