How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?
-
We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO?
My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this?
An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/
-
So, is a flat structure bad for SEO? I mean, it's the pages in the "bottom" of the site structure that are the most important ones...
Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. It depends upon a lot of factors, mostly the size of your site, your goals and the relative amounts of competition that your pages are up against.
Anybody who gives you an answer here is guessing. This is one of the most important strategy decisions that a webmaster can make and a good decision would require an evaluation of your site, keyword competitiveness research, plus information about your business.
On top of that the ideal structure of your site can change over time as it becomes more powerful or as your competitors become more powerful. New sites often do best with a narrow structure and then can go flatter and flatter as they gain power.
It would be best to hire someone who really knows link structure and competitive analysis if you want a good evaluation of this.
-
Hi Richard,
The link to the phone website was just to show an example of what I mean by a "mega drop down". I can give you the link to our website of course but there is no mega drop down yet so there is nothing to see
-
Thank's EGOL!
Yes, I suppose the site will be very flat, but I think that's exactly what our product looks. We sell holiday packages to a lot of different countries/destinations and they are almost equally valuable.
It's also hard to categorise them in submenues. In that case we will end up with the same structure we have today (one page listing all the countries, when I click on a country I get to a country page listing all the destinations for that country, then I click again and get a list of all hotels in that specific destination etc). And it takes a lot of clicks to get to the actual page you are looking for...
So, is a flat structure bad for SEO? I mean, it's the pages in the "bottom" of the site structure that are the most important ones...
-
I am not a huge fan of this type of menuing, but rather categories to products type linking. I don't think Google is going to care as long as you do not have too many links within the page. If you keep this style, you will have to gain even more links to deep pages to strengthen them.
**Your company is a tour operator, yet the linked site is a phone website? Why not give us a link to your site? **
-
Wow, that is a huge dropdown menu!
If the links in the drop down are crawlable then the result of this will be a very flat site architecture with your linkjuice spread widely across lots of pages. The opposite would be to have only a few links in your persistent navigation and the result of that would be to send lots of linkjuice into your main category pages or whichever pages you include in your persistent navigation.
My sites usually have a lot of links in the persistent navigation so having a huge number of links in the dropdown would not change the performance of my site. If your site competes against lots of low to moderately powered pages then this architecture might do well for you.
One concern that I have is with usability. How will the visitor know that there is an enormous navigation hidden in the drop down? This phonehouse site has an oversized navigation bar and that might help call attention to it... or you could use downarrows to signal that there are more links beneath.
I ran spider simulator on the phonehouse site and it looks like the links in that dropdown are crawled.
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
-
Google crawl drop
the crawl request of my company site: https://www.dhgate.com/ has dropped nearly over 95%, from daily 6463599 requests to 476493 requests at 12:00am on 9th, Oct (GMT+8). This dramatic dropping trend not only showed in our GSC crawl stats report but also our company's own log report. We have no idea what’s going on. We want to know whether there is an update of google about crawlling, or is this the issue of our own site? If something is wrong with our site, in what aspects would you recommend us to check, analyze and accordingly optimize?
Technical SEO | | DHgate_20140 -
Changing URLs for SEO
Hi, Currently we have a page, /business, but we have shifted our strategy to optimize for this page for the keyword "enterprise" instead of "business". The page authority of this page is 18 and our domain authority is 35. I've already updated content and title tags to more of an enterprise focus. Would it be wise to move the page to /enterprise and create a 301 redirect from /business to /enterprise? Or is this too risky from an SEO standpoint? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mikekeeper0 -
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
Videos for SEO & Profits
Hello, I'm in the middle of developing a website that will be a tutorial site for SEO, http://universityofseo.com. My plan is to do video tutorials & blog posts to help entry-level SEOs and SMB Owners to help them become familiarized with SEO through quick and easy to watch videos. I eventually want to turn this into a revenue stream through advertisements. I want to know for both SEO and profit reasons, if I should host the videos on youtube and then embed them on my site, or do something like Bits on the Run / Whistia and put ads in the videos that way? I'm not overly obsessed with monetizing the site, but it would be nice to do it, but first and foremost i'm concerned with optimizing the site, having great and actionable content, then monetizing it. I'd appreciate any help on this matter, Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Expressionengine SEO
One of my clients is using expressionengine CMS, and even the simplest things like creating unique page titles seem to be a nightmare. When I try to change page title via cms it also changes navigation menu. Any help will be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Thommas0 -
Differences in Sitemaps SEO wise?
I'm a bit confused about sitemaps. I'm just learning SEO so forgive me if this is a basic question. I've submitted my site to google webmaster using http://pro-sitemaps.com and the sitemap generator it creates. I've also seen sites do this: http://www.johnlewis.com/Shopping/ProductList.aspx and http://www.thesafestcandles.com/site-map.html so I did something similar for my site (www.ldnwicklesscandles.com). You figure you see everyone do it you might as well try it too and hope it works. 😉 So I've done both 1 and 2. Which sitemap is best for SEO purposes or should I do both? Is there any format that should or shouldn't be used for Option 2? Any site examples for good practice would be helpful.
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
Drop down menu
Does the first anchor text link rule ( the first link is given weight ) applies to links in the body of the content only. If there are links in the drop down menu, and in the body of the content, does the above rule applies to links in the drop down menu.
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Switching Hosting & SEO
Hello friends, We are facing the prospect of switching to a new hosting account or company. We are currently using a third-party reseller account but are outgrowing that account. We are considering VPS and dedicated servers. However, this will mean updates for IPs and nameservers. Does anyone have experience with SEO consequences of making switch? Best practices? Tips? Obstacles? Any and all comments/advice welcome. We're trying to balance the potential SEO ramifications of making the switch with the consequences of reduced site speed.
Technical SEO | | Gyi0