Drop down navigation and link juice
-
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
- 's and CSS styling.
-
Take a look at the suckerfish dropdowns at htmldog.com
http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/example/
-
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.
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
-
Too many navigational links
Hi there, I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages. Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure. 1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages.
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?). This is the situation: The website is a webshop The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here. Now here's the problem: The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option. But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues. Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this? Note: pages have good organic positions and authority. Thanks a lot. Marcel0 -
Are no follows leaking link juice?
Recently, in a discussion on resources pages EGOL informed me that just because I had no followed the links on my my resource page, I was still leaking link juice. He mentioned that this was a recent change in Google policy. This was quite a surprise. I have done a couple of searches on this recent change but have not found any information. Am I simply the last one on the planet to learn this and this change is widely known and understood? If so, does that mean honest resource pages (I have two such pages) that are there to help visitors are negatively impacting the site - at least in terms of SEO? If they are leaking link juice is it comparable to a followed link or a smaller amount that has less impact?
Technical SEO | | leatherhidestore0 -
Rel=nofollow for affiliate links?
Hi, For a holiday/travel website including hotels and holiday packages from affiliates I am currently using the rel="nofollow" attribute to link out to the affiliate's website and wanted to know if this is the right way? To be more precise: there are distinct pages for each city and on a city specific page there are ~50 available hotels listed with some other information such as price and address, etc. Each of these hotels have an outlink to the affiliate's hotel website which uses private branding and as such is running on a subdomain hotels.mytraveldomain.tld. So in order not to pass on the link juice to the affiliate's website I thought I would simply use rel="nofollow". Would you also use nofollow? or are there any other opinions out there about that?
Technical SEO | | socialtowards1 -
External Links on a Front Page
Does anyone have any links to information about external links on a front page ? I am advising a client that this is not the best idea and that they could be put in a different place but can't find any proof of this.
Technical SEO | | marcelo-2753980 -
Internal linking to subdomains
Hi *, I have a main site called example.org, and a lot of user generated pages to foo.example.org / bar.example.org and so on. Most of those pages link back to example.org. In example.org I have a page that links to all subdomains. How can I optimize the pagerank of the list page? Should I add nofollow to subdomain sites to avoid passing link juice to those sites and keep normal linking from subdomain sites?
Technical SEO | | ngw0 -
Linking out?
First of all, sorry this Q is all in one block, but iPads don't like this site or vc/vs. When using the SEOmoz on-site keyword optimizer tool, it suggests at least one link to be to an off-site page. Would it be considered a link exchange if we linked out to an niche SUPER Authority sit that had a link back to our website? It seems like a naturally good strategy, but I'm afraid google may not agree. If the answer is no, there are many similar sites that mention our company in ver good ways, awards, etc.., but with no links. I would think this is a no-brainer. Personally I would like to eventually harvest all this press coverage to benefit our site. Btw, I was grey before I learned about SEOmoz, just like the rest of our niche. Now I'm shooting to be Snow White! Hopefully it works out. 🙂 I also wrote two landing pages that I tried to SEO the right way. I would love to hear your feedback to know if they are truly effective and if they are actually white. I think they are, but don't know "all" the rules of being white http://jamproa.com/ideology/product-innovation.php http://jamproa.com/industrial-design/what-is.php Thanks!
Technical SEO | | dmac0 -
External link optimization
The company I work for sells software online. We have deals learning institutes that allow their students to use our software for next to nothing. These learning institutes, which are usually quite strong domains, link to our sign in area. Nice way to get powerful links hey… or is it? There are a couple of problems with these links: They all link to a subdomain (signin.domain.com) The URLs also contain unique identifiers (so that we know which institute they are coming from). Meaning they all link to different signin URLs. (eg. signin.domain.com/qwerty, signin.domain.com/qwerta, signin.domain.com/qwerts, etc. ) So all these links aren't as effective as they could be (or at all?). In a perfect SEO world these links would all point to the start page, however, due to the fact that our start page is of a commercial set up this would run the risk of communicating the wrong idea to the institutes and their students. So… are there any extremely brilliant pro mozzers that have a savvy idea how set this up in a more SEO friendly way? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | henners0