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.
Click To Reveal vs Rollover Navigation Better For Organic?
-
Hi,
Any thoughts, data or insights as which is better in a top navigation... click to reveal the nav links or rollover to reveal the nav links? Regular content in an accordion (click to reveal) is evidently not best practice. Does that apply to navigation as well?
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
Interesting UX question. Short answer; click menu is best, but its not black and white.
Naturally its more subtle than that. You mention regular content. Regular content being hidden by any mechanism is naturally not too user friendly. Accordions can often be overlooked, text hidden in the hover state of images is a client favourite that is also terrible UX practice. The mechanism doesn't matter too much - its the fact content is hidden by an un-signposted mechanism. The author knows its there, but your visitor will not.
Menu isn't content though; its a different beast. A menu needs to exhibit good information hierarchy. We try to keep our main menu to 7 items or less, essentially for clarity of the first tier of offerings. This can often necessitate sub-menus. Sub-menus are hidden content, we're just arguing the toss about mechanism. So first off we'd suggest a nice little signpost like a downward arrow to show which main items have sub-menus
Also note we don't have hover states on touch devices, so unless you're planning on a second type of menu for that, your choice is made for you and it'll certainly need to be selection rather than hover based.
Select to get something is more in keeping with how everything else on the web works; text links, buttons etc. Hover feels more immediate but if your site demographic is broad, bear in mind that the dexterity required will elude a percentage of your audience. Consider the accessibility implications of this and your site client needs.
For example, hover menus can be a real pain when the sub-menu content is wider than the trigger area. This will have happened to all of you; hover over the main menu item, see the sub-menu item you want, move the mouse to select the sub menu item... o dear the sub menu has disappeared on you. You left the hover area before reaching the sub menu and the hover state is lost. As well as accidental deactivation its quite possible to get annoying accidental activation with hover too.
As well as audience consider the sub-menu itself. If you have a couple of small items consider hover, a massive mega-menu will nearly always be better toggled by selection. On that note, if you're using mega-menus consider Nielsens excellent guide here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mega-menus-work-well/
PS: I'd encourage everyone to start thinking about selection rather than 'clicks'. I still slip up myself, but clicks are an outmoded, desktop-centric term that is very dangerous to bandy about when making responsive websites. Much as your anchor text should never be "Click here" we should always be thinking about "selection". Selection speaks to intent and action rather than physical methodology, as that methodology can be clicking, yes, but also tapping, voice command, keyboard based, etc.
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
-
My direct traffic went up and my organic traffic went down. Help!
So on Oct. 21, our direct traffic increased 3x and our organic traffic decreased 3x. And it has been that way ever since. Almost like they flip flopped. Additionally, that was the same day I started retargeting to our site. I have tagged all the links from the ads and they're being counted as google paid clicks in GA. And our accounts are linked. I am just dumbfounded as to how this could happen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP1 -
Mega Menu Navigation Best Practice
First off, I'm a landscape/nature/travel photographer. I mainly sell prints of my work. I'm in the process of redesigning my website, and I'm trying to decide whether to keep the navigation extremely simple or leave the drop-down menu for galleries. Currently, my navigation is something like this: Galleries
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg1
> Gallery for State or Country (example: California)
> Sub-region in State or Country (example: San Francisco)
Blog
Prints
About
Contact Selling prints is the top priority of the website, as that's what runs the business. I have lots of blog content, and I'm starting to build some good travel advice, etc. but in reality, the galleries, which then filter down to individual pages for each photo with a cart system, are the most important. What I'm struggling to decide is whether to leave the sort of "mega menu" for the galleries, or to do away with them, and have the user go to the overall galleries page to navigate further into the site. Leaving the mega menu intact, the galleries page becomes a lot less important, and takes out a step to get to the shopping cart. However, I'm wondering if the amount of galleries in the drop down menu is giving TOO many choices up front as well. I also wonder how changing this will affect search. Any thoughts on which is better or is it really just a matter of preference?0 -
Silo vs breadcrumbs in 2015
Hi ive heard silos being mentioned in the past to help with rankings does this still apply? and what about breadcrumbs do i use them with the silo technique or instead of which ones do you think are better or should i not be using these anymore with the recent google updates?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juun0 -
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 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales). My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead. Would you noindex this page or not? Any thoughts?0 -
Canonical VS Rel=Next & Rel=Prev for Paginated Pages
I run an ecommerce site that paginates product pages within Categories/Sub-Categories. Currently, products are not displayed in multiple categories but this will most likely happen as time goes on (in Clearance and Manufacturer Categories). I am unclear as to the proper implementation of Canonical tags and Rel=Next & Rel=Prev tags on paginated pages. I do not have a View All page to use as the Canonical URL so that is not an option. I want to avoid duplicate content issues down the road when products are displayed in multiple categories of the site and have Search Engines index paginated pages. My question is, should I use the Rel=Next & Rel=Prev tags on paginated pages as well as using Page One as the Canonical URL? Also, should I implement the Canonical tag on pages that are not yet paginated (only one page)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
800 Number vs. Local Phone
I have a client with multiple locations throughout the US. They are currently using different 800 numbers on their site for their different locations. As they try to optimize their local presence but submitting to local directories, we are trying to determine two things: Does having a local number reroute to an 800 number devalue the significance of it being a local number (I've never heard of this, but someone told them it did) Locality and consistency are important. Assuming they can't remove the 800 numbers from the site, are they better off keeping the 800 numbers on their site and using local numbers every else online OR just using the 800 numbers for all of their local listings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caleone0 -
Site Architecture: Cross Linking vs. Siloing
I'm curious to know what other mozzers think about silo's... Can we first all agree that a flat site architecture is the best practice? Relevant pages should be grouped together. Shorter, broader and (usually) therefore higher volume keywords should be towards the top of each category. Navigation should flow from general to specific. Agreed? As Google say's on page 10 of their SEO Starter Guide, "you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content ." OK, we all agree so far, right? Great! Enter my question: Bruce Clay (among others) seem to recommend siloing as a best practice. While Richard Baxter (and many others @ SEOmoz), seem to view silos as a problem. Me? I've practiced (relevant) internal cross linking, and have intentionally avoided siloing in almost all cases. What about you? Is there a time and place to use silos? If so, when and where? If not, how do we rectify the seemingly huge differences of opinions between expert folks such as Baxter and Clay?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DonnieCooper7