Requirements for mobile menu design have created a duplicated menu in the text/cache view.

[TrinityPower]

Hi,

Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the main menu has been duplicated.

Please see:  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.trinitypower.com&strip=1

Our coder tells me he created one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version.  Duplicating the menu cannot be good for on page SEO.  With that said, I have had no warnings reported back from Moz.  Maybe the moz bots are not tuned to looks for such a duplication error.

Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements.  I did not like the look and feel of the responsive version created based on the desktop version.

Hi solution to this problem is to convert the Mobile version menu into ajax.  what do you guys think?

Thanks,

Jarrett

[TrinityPower]

Thanks George, much appreciated.

[webmethod]

Hi Jarrett,

Although the menus probably look different in your designs (an assumption on my part), the HTML looks identical on the link you provided (ULs/LIs). If the HTML is the same, then you'll use CSS to vary the appearance of them - specificially using the viewport on responsive mobile which is designed for exactly this scenario.

Perhaps I'm missing some other dev reason why it can't be done, but using ajax for this, even if you do attempt to block Google crawling it sounds like an over-engineered solution.

George

[TrinityPower]

thanks George,

The menu for the mobile view is quite different... mega menu style. I may go back to pure responsive, but what do you think of this proposed solution from my developer?

"The original menu were responsive. But for new mobile menu, I had to create new separate responsive menu for mobile version. Because I couldn't implement the new design on existing menu. Both menus are same in terms of text but different in terms of tags and structure.

***For the Ajax, the menu will call from other URL and we can disallow this URL to crawl for Google and other Search Engine. So in the text version only one version will be displayed."

It feels like a hack to me and I am concerned about it both being browser compatible moving forward and if there would be any negative impact I can't think of having do to with mobile crawl bots.

Thanks,

Jarrett

[webmethod]

Hi,

Moz won't report this as an issue because there's no such detectable issue as having duplicate content on the same page. Duplicate content issues are discovered between two or more pages.

You could ajax the mobile menu, but given that google can and will crawl with javascript enabled, it will probably still come across 2 menus.

Personally I'd tell the developer to come up with a responsive solution. Looking at the markup, I'm guessing there will be at least some similarities between desktop and mobile menu experiences. Possibly a bit more painful in the short term, but worth it in the long run.

George