What are best options for website built with navigation drop-down menus in JavaScript, to get those menus indexed by Google?
-
This concerns f5.com, a large website with navigation menus that drop down when hovered over. The sub nav items (example: “DDoS Protection”) are not cached by Google and therefore do not distribute internal links properly to help those sub-pages rank well.
Best option naturally is to change the nav menus from JS to CSS but barring that, is there another option? Will Schema SiteNavigationElement work as an alternate?
-
Meh, I guess not. It's just like talking about it to clients or friends. I've made some fine noise with lots of technical words.
-
Hi Carl - Did you see Travis' thoughtful response to your question?
-
I would generally prefer CSS over JS for navigational elements, but that probably isn't the problem here. Google can crawl JavaScript and attribute links fine. And per SEM Rush, it looks like the site is enjoying a pretty sharp uptick in organic traffic recently. That would seem to be at odds with big indexation problems.
I'm not so sure if it's my network, I'm on a sub par connection now, but I noticed that some CSS and JS files were timing out when I crawled the site. That could lead to a big problem. I would advise that someone check the server log files and see if those files are regularly timing out. Ideally one would want their CSS and JS files combined/concatenated where possible, to reduce the possibility of any such rendering issues.
More on that from SE Roundtable
I checked the cache for the EN version of a few of those pages, and they appear to be cached fine.
cache:https://f5.com/products/security/distributed-denial-of-service-ddos-protection yields, which is pretty much what we want.
But I do see some problems that could lead to problems with indexation/display. The site has a number of different languages/translations. However, I noticed that the hreflang attribute was missing. It's strongly recommended that hreflang is implemented. You're good on the language meta tag Bing recommends, though.
That would cause some problems, especially on a site that large. I've researched Radware, their competitor, years ago. F5 seems like the type of organization that would pay for a decent translation. (my German and Spanish are so limited, I couldn't discern the quality of the translations) But if it is automatically generated, that would more than likely lead to indexation problems as well.
Another thing I see is that each translation is marked as canonical. This could also cause problems with display and link equity.
Here's more on internationalization from Moz and Google.
I would also look for ways to build internal links to the important products (DDoS Mitigation is supposed to be a huge money maker now.) on the home page, in the body. Not just in boilerplate (nav... footer... etc....) areas.
Edit: Forgot to mention that the mobile menu doesn't appear to directly link important products. I would make sure the experience is the same across devices.
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
-
Removing a site from Google index with no index met tags
Hi there! I wanted to remove a duplicated site from the google index. I've read that you can do this by removing the URL from Google Search console and, although I can't find it in Google Search console, Google keeps on showing the site on SERPs. So I wanted to add a "no index" meta tag to the code of the site however I've only found out how to do this for individual pages, can you do the same for a entire site? How can I do it? Thank you for your help in advance! L
Technical SEO | | Chris_Wright1 -
Having trouble getting listed on Google News
My friend has a site: http://www.behindthehedges.com/ and is having trouble getting accepted into Google News. I read over the technical guidelines and best practices listed on Google's site. It appears they have everything covered. However, they keep getting rejected. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Is my website indexed correctly in Google - www.couponshop.co.uk
Our website www.couponshop.co.uk has just had a relaunch after a change of direction.
Technical SEO | | LaurenGT
A lot of the pages were redirected. When I checked the indexing of the website on Google, I put site:couponshop.co.uk and only two pages come up, but when I put site:www.couponshop.co.uk they all show up.
Is this correct or are we doing something wrong?0 -
Does Index Status Goes Down If Website is Penalized by Google?
Hi Friends, Few of my friends told me that index status of a website goes down goes if it is penalized by Google. I can see my organic traffic has went down drastically after the Panda update on July 17th 2015 but index status still remains the same. So, I am bit confused. Any advice on this.
Technical SEO | | Prabhu.Sundar0 -
How best to optimise a website for more than one location?
I have a client who is a acupuncturist and operates clinics both in Chester and Knutsford in Cheshire the site performs well for Chester based terms such as "Chester acupuncture" this is the primary location the client wishes to focus efforts on but would also like to improve rankings for the Knutsford clinic and area. I have setup local places pages for each clinic and registered each on different local directories. Both clinic addresses are placed on each page of the website and have a map to each on the contact page. Most of the on-page SEO elements such as page titles, descriptions and on-page keywords mainly focus on the term "Chester" over "Knutsford" is it advisable to target both locations in these page elements or will local search have an effect on this and will reduce/ dilute overall rankings for Chester clinic? I haven't setup and separate page for each clinic location as this might help in terms of SEO for improving ranking for both locations but from a user point of view it would just duplicate the same content but for a different location and also would create duplicate content issues. Any advice/ experience on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Google indexing thousands crazy search results with %25253
In GWT I started seeing very strange pages indexed a few weeks, and Google is no reporting over 21,000 of pages (blocked by robots.txt) with weird URLs like this: http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%2525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%2525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results The current robots.txt looks like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | BoulderJoe
Disallow: /wp-content Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /data
Disallow: /slideshows
Disallow: /page/*/?s=
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search This website is running an up to date WP install with Yoast's Google Analytics and SEO plug-in. I can't point to anything specific that happened with the site when these URLs started appearing even after I modified the robots.txt. What can be done to try and stop Google from creating and indexing these goofy URLs? I see lots of sites having this issue when I search in Google, but no one seems to have a solution.0 -
Whats the best way to stop search results from being indexed?
I Have a Wordpress Site, and just realized that the search results are being indexed on Google creating duplicate content. Whats the best way for me to stop these search result pages from being indexed without stopping the regulars and important pages and posts from being indexed as well? **The typical search query looks like this: ** http://xxx.com/?s=Milnerton&search=search&srch_type AND this also includes results that are linked to the "view more" such as:
Technical SEO | | stefanok
http://xxx.com/index.php?s=viewmore Your help would be much appreciated. regards Stef0 -
Are Google now indexing iFrames?
A client is pulling content through an iFrame, and when searching for a snippet of that exact content the page that is pulling the data is being indexed and not the iFrame page. Seen this before?
Technical SEO | | White.net0