Is this type of navigation SEO friendly?
-
Hi mozzers,
I wanted to know if this type of navigation SEO friendly. Is it better than the regular drop down menu navigation?
Thanks!
-
Thank you guys for your contributions! Much appreciated!
-
Sitemaps serve a very different purpose from the on-page navigation, Dave. Both html and xml sitemaps are essential for helping ensure pages get crawled and indexed, but they do nothing to distribute and direct the ranking value from one page to another. So they help get your pages found by search engine crawlers but they won't help your rankings (i.e. getting found by your prospective visitors.)
Sitemaps are never a replacement for quality, well thought out, SE-accessible navigation and in-context links.
Paul
-
So long as you have an XML site map and a HTML sitemap, then Google shouldn't have any issues.
The HTML Sitemap could be a link at the bottom of your page
-
Just to update, Taysir - here's a screenshot of the same page with JavaScript disabled. Notice how the menu gracefully falls back to just a CSS-based regular dropdown. This is much more likely to be consistently crawled by search engines than the JS-dependent version.
This is the standard best practice for this type of situation, both for usability and SEO. A webpage should "just work" in a basic browser, and then can add additional appearance/functionality improvements for "enhanced" browsers. This is obviously what's best for users, and also gives the (very basic) search crawlers the best option as well.
In other words - mega menus are certainly NOT "better" for SEO, but they don't have to a problem either, if implemented correctly.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
That's what's now typically referred to as a mega-menu, taysir. It uses JavaScript for the fancy display but If it's coded properly, there's a fallback version that uses regular html/CSS. (You can test by disabling JS in your browser then revisiting the page.)
Unlike Andy, I'm never willing to "trust" that search engines can handle JS-based navigation. It's just too big a risk for me. (Though his opinion is perfectly valid too). So I always make sure something JS-based like this has the CSS fallback version properly coded as well to be safest. Then I can certain it's SEO-friendly in all cases.
Jut my $0.02, adjusted for exchange rate and inflation
Paul
-
Depends. In their case it makes sense because they have too many links to have a typical drop down. Here's more content to read from Distilled which explains the dos and donts
-
It's a little awkward to tell as there is no URL to look at, but if Google is finding their way around your site, you can guess they probably have no issues.
Remember that Google is good at finding their way around Javascript menus, so these day, pretty much anything goes.
Just keep links natural, easy to follow and descriptive. You don't want to be trying anything spammy at this level.
-Andy
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
-
does <base> in html affect seo?
hey, just wanna know does <base> in head of website affect SEO? and if it's a yes, how?
Technical SEO | | m17001 -
SEO of Social Media Pages
I have noticed something odd about how Google ranks social media pages, and was hoping someone would have a good explanation. When I search for a particular name in Google, the first two results are Twitter pages of two people who share the same name. #1 is an older account with more Tweets, but it has fewer followers, no external backlinks, and the URL is unrelated to the name #2 is a newer account, but it has more followers, a few external backlinks, and the name itself is in the URL. It has fewer overall Tweets, but has Tweeted more frequently over the past several months. #2 is also happens to be in the same City as I am. Given my understanding of Google's ranking factors, I would not have expected #1 to outrank #2. In fact, I would not have expected #1 to even be on the first page. What could be causing #1 to rank so highly? Does it make sense that the age of the account or the number of Tweets would affect SEO at all? Really, I am just trying to understand what are the main factors that determine the ranking of social media profile pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | timsegraves0 -
Global Product Tabs and SEO
I am looking at a site that has global or duplicated content in 4 tabs for things like shipping, quality etc on tabs on each product page. The content is very good for UX and helps conversions but poor for SEO. Each product page has unique and tagged photos, unique title and a unique description. Is there away to specifically tell search engines that individual parts of a page are duplicated for good reason? Linking to the content to a single page decreases conversion dramatically but having it on tabs could effect ranking and quality as it is duplicated. Can anyone offer any advice with this?
Technical SEO | | Ian_W0 -
Problems with Wordpress and Yoast SEO Plugin
Hi, I've been working with a Wordpress site and the Wordpress SEO plugin for a few months now and I've managed to get pretty decent results for some of the keywords I was targeting, however since last week I've lost all my rankings sharply and everything dropped out. This had happened once before and the problem was that the plugin was somehow stopped but not this time. I've had a look through all of the MOZ resources and I cannot find what the problem might be. Page optimization hasn't changed and the on page rankings are the same here. Everything seems to be the same except that all my top 10 ranking disappeared. I'm new to all of this and I'm still learning so I'd appreciate if anyone could help me on this. I'm up for trying any ideas you might have but I've tried almost everything I could. I've reinstalled, updated and done everything I could with the plugin, I've checked that Google is indexing the pages and it is. I've monitored for errors on the pages and critical issues, nothing major to report so I don't know anymore what to do. Thank you so much in advance for your help. M3rgAcQ paFNOlb
Technical SEO | | rodcunha0 -
Wordpress Pods and Wordpress SEO by Yoast
Hi I am optimising a new site that has been built in Wordpress using Pods. The Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin is not recognising any content on the site - has anyone any ideas on how to get around this - does it matter - is it the plugin that is at fault rahter than the set up of the site?
Technical SEO | | Highlandgael1 -
Friendly URLs
Hi, I have an important news site and I am trying to implement user friendly URLs. Now, when you click a news in the homepage, it goes to a redirect.php page and then goes to a friendly url. the question is, It is better to have the friendly URL in the first link or it is the same for the robot having this in the finally url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Duplicate Content on SEO Pages
I'm trying to create a bunch of content pages, and I want to know if the shortcut I took is going to penalize me for duplicate content. Some background: we are an airport ground transportation search engine(www.mozio.com), and we constructed several airport transportation pages with the providers in a particular area listed. However, the problem is, sometimes in a certain region multiple of the same providers serve the same places. For instance, NYAS serves both JFK and LGA, and obviously SuperShuttle serves ~200 airports. So this means for every airport's page, they have the super shuttle box. All the provider info is stored in a database with tags for the airports they serve, and then we dynamically create the page. A good example follows: http://www.mozio.com/lga_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/jfk_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/ewr_airport_transportation/ All 3 of those pages have a lot in common. Now, I'm not sure, but they started out working decently, but as I added more and more pages the efficacy of them went down on the whole. Is what I've done qualify as "duplicate content", and would I be better off getting rid of some of the pages or somehow consolidating the info into a master page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0 -
Is the copy-paste function under tynt.com SEO friendly
Hello you suggest http://www.tynt.com/publisher-tools/copy-and-paste-to-share-content/ in your pro tipps but I wonder why you are not using it for your own blog under seomoz.org. I noticed that when somebody copy and paste something form my blog a strange code is added to the link: Expample: http://www.janik.cc/webdesigner-blog/2011/02/sample/#ixzz1FQvadWNV Is the #ixzz1FQvadWNV maybe not that good in a seo view of point?
Technical SEO | | MichaelJanik0