Is there anything I need to worry about if... We show/hide header navigation based upon visit from external traffic?
-
Scenario: So imagine if LinkedIn turned off their main navigation/header if you landed on your personal profile via a search engine or via an external link. But if you were on LinkedIn when you found it, the navigation remains the same.
-
Hi CJ,
I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to do this, but I'm sure you've done the analysis to determine that it's better for your UX. Just make sure you consider this:
Not sure what you're using to make the nav dynamic, but you should make sure Google sees it the way you intend. You can use the Fetch and Render in Search Console. You can also use the first part of this inforgraphic to set up a browser to view your site in a live environment the way search engines see your site.
You'll want to make sure that once you've disabled CSS and JS that your navigation is still visible. A lot of authority/juice/whateveryouwantocallit is passed through your nav. Having your nav visible this way also ensures quicker crawling/indexing of new content on your site.
-
I think there's no problem if UX is your main goal. It's the same thing if you hide some blocks on mobile vs desktop.
Don't worry and think about user !
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
-
CMS Pages - Multiple URLS (/)
Hi guys, this type of question has been asked a few times before but I couldn't find something that told me what i need so apologies if its a tad repetitive. I use Magento, and have several pages using its CMS. However, it produces 2 URLS for each page with a simple /. For example, website.com/hire
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
website.com/hire/ I know google treats this as 2 separate pages, which would be the better solution. 1. Write a URL re-write for every CMS page
RewriteRule ^hire$ http://www.website.com/hire/ [R=301,L] (Is this right?) 2. Write a general rewrite rule to always add the /
No idea where to begin with this 3. Add a Canonical tag to the page which i think is possible in magento by adding this to the Custom Design Layout XML option in the page CMS. <action method="addLinkRel"></action> <rel>canonical</rel> <href>http://www.website.com/hire/</href> This would make the /hire/ page self-reference and the /hire page reference the /hire/ page I think. Which one of these solutions is the best and any pointers with the coding would be grand.0 -
Links / Metadata around Recent Posts etc in Wordpress / Blog - Good SEO Practice?
Hello In a Wordpress blog ( or part of an ecommerce site that runs under wordpress ) it is good to show recent posts in the sidebar on most pages. Obviously the posts aren't going to be relevant to every post , so my questions are: Is having these on the page hurting SEO for the page? Is there good metadata structure to put in there? ( like rel="nofollow" or similar ) Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
Thanks for your time
Marty0 -
Clarity needed on 301 redirects
Looking to get a bit of clarity on redirects: We're getting ready to launch a new website with a simplified url structure (we're consolidating pages & content) & I already know that I'll have to employ 301 redirects from the old url structure to the new. What I'm not clear about is how specifc I should be. Here's an example of my file structure: Old website: www.website.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSimmons17
New website: www.website.com Old website: www.website.com/vacations
New website: www.website.com/vacations Old website: www.website.com/vacations/costa-rica
New website: www.website.com/vacations/central-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/costa-rica/guanacaste
New website: www.website.com/vacations/central-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/mexico
New website: www.website.com/vacations/central-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/mexico/cancun
New website: www.website.com/vacations/central-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/bolivia
New website: www.website.com/vacations/south-america Old website: www.website.com/vacations/bolivia/la-paz
New website: www.website.com/vacations/south-america Do I need to redirect each and every page or would just redirecting just the folder be enough to keep my SEO juice? Many thanks in advance for any help!0 -
How correcttly redirect to http://m.mobile.com website
Hi everyone, I will appreciate if you will drop here a piece of script ( or link to ) for CORRECT redirection for our http://m.mobile.com website. We are confused what type of redirection should we use java script, htaccess, php, 301, 302....? in order not to damage any rankings and etc... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
webdeal0 -
SERPS showing wrong page
I have optimised a homepage for two keywords. I optimised this a few weeks ago and the page has been crawled by Google, also before this it was already reasonably well optimised for these terms. However, the homepage is not appearing in Google for these terms. Instead two other random pages on the site are appearing for these terms that have not been optimised for these keywords and have few mentions of the keywords on the pages!?? These pages have a lower DA and lower inbound links than the homepage. The homepage is showing for other lower competition keywords. Could anyone offer me some insight into this? The homepage content has been posted on other websites by a former SEO consultant - to a business directory for one? Could duplicate content be causing this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | absolutely170 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0 -
What would you pick? Species/Breed or Topic
If you'd like to take a look, the site under quesiton is http://ArkAnimals.Com. At the moment I am considering doing landing pages by topics and not by the type of animals. I will be blending both wild and domestic animals but how to best do this is confusing since so much has changed over the years. My competitors are focusing on animal types mainly and competition is fierce. Also the site attracts by three main topics not specific animals--so I want to be a bit unique which is why I am considering a topic driven focus. What would you recommend? Background This site has been online since 1994 and on its own domain for a long while. However, over time it has suffered from a lot of things--different designers, expansion, movement of content to niche sites and bad seo. LOL Once everything was on one site with sub directories. Then, it expanded and my online advisors recommended moving topics off into their own niche sites. So, I did that. Ugh. Now, much of that content is being integrated back as I am undergoing an intense revamp (the last one was a disaster). There are a few presenting problems that I could use your perspective and expertise--since I am too close to it. Problems for Needing Your Input The site is over 2600 pages with many in html and others in php.What is the best practice? Moving the remaining html pages over into php? Some of the pages that were not active have a redirect to the blog. I plan on doing page to page 301 redirects once I dig in--unless you have a better idea. There are a lot of well established links to some of the pages. How many topics are too many? I have a wide variety of content. First, the magazine format covered about six topics. Later, I began covering more pet related items and did a lot of different news summaries to keep it fresh. I want to dump the short outdated pages as many of them have obsolete links or are too short to add any value. Or should I update if they help with the seo rather than continue to let them dilute the site? Landing page or blog? Which is better, an index landing page or blog? At the moment the blog appears on the main index for freshness and the site attracts traffic for specific topics not animal breeds or species. I want to move the site from an educational site to serving as a main funnel for potential clients driving them to get on a list or to a niche site for sales related to the particular topic/training of interest. What your take on this if you were to tackle it? Any input would be greatly appreciated. My audience includes those who are pet owners, novice trainers, and animal lovers with no critter sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheARKlady0 -
Navigation - Balancing UX & SEO
I'm currently evaluating our navigation in the course of a site relaunch. From reading a number of articles and posts on seoMOZ, here are the elements I've found important to consider: Use CSS (not Javascript) for the primary drop-down navigation menu Get rid of two design elements from our earlier days: The 30 something site-wide category links in the footer, and many no-followed internal links (in an attempt to sculpt PR) Keep all pages within 3 clicks of the homepage, and have ample cross-links within internal pages. The one major problem I'm facing is how to balance UX and SEO in the primary navigation bar. To illustrate, let's assume I sell Tennis equipment. If one of the top-level categories on my navigation bar was "Rackets", if I was designing purely with SEO in mind the category names would be: Tennis Rackets -> Wilson Tennis Rackets Head Tennis Rackets Prince Tennis Rackets ....as the full, three word anchor text will be most specific and valuable to pass reputation to the category pages. However, from a UX perspective, writing "Tennis Rackets" after each category is unnecessary, and it would look MUCH cleaner to instead have: Tennis Rackets -> Wilson Head Prince ....but this would obviously be less beneficial from a SEO standpoint for each individual, manufacturer racquet page as the entire search term ("Wilson Tennis Rackets") is not in the anchor text. As these links will be on every page of the site, I'm struggling with which to choose - clean navigation or improved SEO. My Questions: I would love to hear the communities thoughts on how to weigh the balance of these two - clean UX navigation vs. SEO-rich specific anchor text - in navigation. Also, I'd appreciate hearing if any of my original 3 assumptions for the re-design are off-base or incorrect. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY0