Site architecture: Deep drop menus & flat hidden menu?
-
I hope this makes sense. I am creating a site that will have normal drop down menu structure that will be about 3 levels deep: site.com/category/topic/sub-topic . I also want to add content that will be set up under a hidden menu, but with a sidebar module (placed on the relevant pages that are set up under the drop down) with links to other custom pages that will be relevant to the drop menu pages, but i'm hoping that the flat structure pages will show better for search: site.com/content-page
The reason I am asking is because I have seen a competitor do this for a personal injury law firm and they show everywhere (throughout California) for vanity search -"city car accident lawyer". When you go to the site, they have a personal injury drop down that is 3 layers deep, but when you click down the layers, and look at the URL, they are all "flat" site.com/car-accident-lawyer, not site.com/personal-injury/accidents/car-accident-lawyer.
Is having a hidden menu a problem? Is this strategy problematic in any way?
Hope that makes sense. Thank you for any direction.
BB
-
Hi BBuck,
I think I understand what you're saying, and there are 2 separate issues that I see you've brought up
First, while there's nothing necessarily wrong with distributing navigation the way you've described, I find from a UX (user experience) standpoint that this is best avoided. Aside from that, I'm unaware of any reason it would be a bad practice.
As for the URL issue you mention in the second paragraph, that can be taken care of with 301 redirects / rewrites. Basically, take this example: I have a page that's www.example.com/familiar/general/specific, but I don't want such a long URL. Using 301 redirects and rewrites, I would have the page stay the same, but the end of the URL could be whatever I want, like www.example.com/specific. If you're unfamiliar with how that works, I suggest either hiring a developer to do it (which would take a few seconds per page), or finding a quick tutorial if you have access to your website's back-end.
I hope that helps you!
-
I am not sure if I understood this properly, can you point us to the competitor's site to have a look at it.
You can have a landing page like site.com/car-accident-lawyer and have the header navigation setup as site.com >> personal-injury >> accidents >> car-accident-lawyer. There is nothing wrong with that , but personally I prefer to classify content in to topics / sub topics, instead of having all the lading pages one hop away.
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
-
Ajax tabs on site
Hello, On a webpage I have multiple tabs, each with their own specific content. Now these AJAX/JS tabs, if Google only finds the first tab when the page loads the content would be too thin. What do you suggest as an implementation? With Google being able to crawl and render more JS nowadays, but they deprecated AJAX crawling a while back. I was maybe thinking of doing a following implementation where when JS is disabled, the tabs collapse under each other with the content showing. With JS enabled then they render as tabs. This is usually quite a common implementation for tabbed content plugins on Wordpress as well. Also, Google had commented about that hidden/expandable content would count much less, even with the above JS fix. Look forward to your thoughts on this. Thanks, Conrad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conalt1 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Should I just redirect all my sites to my main site.
Hi, Over the last few years I have built many sites and own a lot of domain names. Some have high page rank some have high domain authority and some have many back links. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with all the links and being able to provide quality content for everything. Should I just redirect everything to my one site that make the most money as all sites are for the same industry, but in different categories of that industry. So I could 301 redirect all the sites to the relevant page on my money site. Would it be a problem is 1000's if not 10,000's of links all of a sudden pointed in to one site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cibble030 -
Merging 11 community sites into 1 regional site
I am merging 11 real estate community sites into 1 regional site and don't really know what type of redirect should I use for the homepage?, for instance: www.homepage.com redirect to www.regionalsite.com/community-page Should I 301 this redirect? If yes, how could I 301 redirect a homepage to an internal page in my new site? Cheers 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mbulox0 -
Backlinking 3 sites from same domain and backlinking main site too
Hello, we have 4 sites, in which 1 is a main site and rest 3 are niche sites All these 3 sites have dofollow links to main site from home page We got a high quality backlink - through which all 3 niche sites have got it from that domain Is it worth to add backlink from that domain to main site too, despite the fact the 3 sites already have recvd it and they all link to main site many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Affiliate & canonicals
Hi, any help with this one would be great.... www.example.com sells widgets online. They are also promoted on a 3rd party website www.partner.com. Currently www.partner.com links to a page on www.example.com that is completely branded with the 'partners' design, style and unique copy (you would think you were still on 'partner' website). I saw this interesting article from 2011: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-seo-value-from-your-affiliate-links (in particular idea 1) Do you think adding a rel=canonical on www.example.com's partner page is still safe? All the best & thank you, Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
Changing Site URLs
I am working on a new client that hasn't implemented any SEO previously. The site has terrible url nomenclature and I am wondering if it is worth it to try and change it. Will I lose rankings? What is the best url naming structure? Here's the website http://www.formica.com/en/home/TradeLanding.aspx. (I am only working on the North America site.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
How do you prevent the mobile site becoming a duplicate of the full browser site?
We have a larger site with 100k+ pages, we need to create a mobile site which gets indexed in the mobile engines but I am afraid that google bot will consider these pages duplicates of the normal site pages. I know I can block it on the robots.txt but I still need it to be indexed for mobile search engines and I think google has a mobile crawler as well. Feel free to give me any other tips that I should follow while trying to optimize the mobile version. Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0