Drop down navigation and link juice
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Hi!
We are desperately needing to overhaul our site navigation setup, and we have so many categories that we think our site could really benefit from a drop down navigation similar to what these sites have:
We've held off doing this type of navigation in the past because we were only seeing people use flash to create it and we knew that it wouldn't be good for link juice. But these two sites are using HTML and CSS - which seems like a much better style and good for SEO. Do you agree? We want to make the switch but are worried about losing linking power by nesting our navigation in
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Take a look at the suckerfish dropdowns at htmldog.com
http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/example/
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Only 1 of those sites has drop-down navigation for me, but I'll assume that the other is representative of what you are referring down.
There are a few ways to do drop down navigation. Some are better than others in terms of SEO. My experience is that a pure CSS method is the most indexable, so I would stick to that. You can easily test if this is the case by disabling all styles when you a view a page (for instance by using the webdeveloper toolbar): A pure css menu will show all the items in plain text.
I've used these extensively for years and am happy to do so. When we first started using the pure css versions of such menus I had concerned that the hidden layers would either hide or devalue the links. We did quite a bit of testing at the time and were happy that this wasn't the case.
That was some time ago, but I do not believe that has changed. Certainly links in such menus are followed and we haven't seen any measurable drop in linkweight being passed.
More importantly though users respond well to them. Such menus provide an inuitive means to breakdown a large number of options in an easily digested manner.
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