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.
Putting nav code at the bottom of a page?
-
Hey,
We are doing a re-design on our websites and we have run into a little problem.
Basically we need to put the nav code at the bottom of the page (so when you view source all the nav code it at the bottom) but the nav will of course still show at the top.
Will this cause any issues with our SEO? Will it make the nav seem less important or get crawled less?
Thanks for the help in advance!
Ricky
-
I have placed the nav code at the bottom of the HTML doc at times. I can't really say that it is a significant difference for SEO. It doesn't take a lot of work to do if you are skilled with HTML/CSS but I can't really say that this methodology will have a long term benefit for SEO.
HTML 5 has new tags that sites should adopt such as
<nav>and other tags to indicate what that chunk of content is. These tags are supported by all major browsers at this point. I don't know all the specific browser versions. I would recommend this moving forward where possible. By using this tags the crawlers likely will not factor in position in the document to understand the importance of chunks of content.</nav>
-
I see the value of associating anchor text with content links rather than navigation, but I agree with EGOL more than Ryan on this one. What if users are viewing the site with CSS disabled? Maybe because it's easier to view with a screen reader for blind/partially sighted people - it's not very user-friendly having the main navigation links only at the bottom is it?
-
I think that google is smart enough to tell nav code from content.
Most people who do this are probably wasting their time.
I put the nav code at the top... it contains some of my most important links.
Think about it.... If you think that Google can't identify nav code then this is like putting the links to your most important category pages in the footer. Do you really want to do that?
-
Hi Ricky, how big is this site... I have done this 3 years ago on a site I manage of about 100 pages. It worked fine from the first day. My main drive for this though was: I had one horizontal nav on top with no value links which the client insisted in having plus the beefy left hand vertical nav with the right keywords in. In the code I displaced the top horizontal nav to the bottom as and kept the left hand side vertical navigation on the top (codewise). It works wonderfully and no issues with Google at all.
cheers
david
-
Placing the navigation code at the bottom of your HTML is preferable from a SEO perspective.
I have never heard of any system that "had" to place the nav code at the bottom. I've always had to specifically request the nav code be moved to the bottom of the page. I am curious. What software are you working with that requires the code placed at the bottom?
Presently crawlers read your site's HTML code from top to bottom. By placing your nav code at the bottom you can associate anchor text with your content links rather then your navigation links, which is generally preferable. This reasoning is why I position the nav code at the bottom of the html code.
In the future that may change with HTML and other semantic markup offering the ability for crawlers to easily identify content, but for now your approach is preferable in my experience.
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
-
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
Should i Noindex my privacy policy page?:
Hi, We have a privacy policy page but it can be found at Copyscape and might affect Google Panda content farming. My questions is, should i Noindex my private policy page?:
Technical SEO | | chanel270 -
No_index of parent page
Hi, sorry its a Friday question... Page A: www.example.com/house/ Page B: www.example.com/house/kitchen Can I 'no_index' page A without it effecting page B being indexed? Views? Many thanks!
Technical SEO | | Richard5551 -
Where to put Schema On Page
What part of my page should I put Schema data? Header? Footer? Also All pages? or just home page?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3114