Are dropdown menus bad for SEO
-
I have an ecommerce shop here: http://m00.biz/UHuGGC
I've added a submenu for each major category and subcategory of items for sale. There are over 60 categories on that submenu. I've heard that loading this (and the number of links) before the content is very bad for SEO. Some will place the menu below the content and use absolute positioning to put the menu where it currently is now. It's a bit ridiculous in doing things backwards and wondering if search engines really don't understand. So the question is twofold:
(1) Are the links better in a bottom loading sidemenu where they are now?
(2) Given the number of links (about 80 in total with all categories and subcategories), is it bad to have the sidemenu show the subcategories which, in this instance, are somewhat important? Should I just go for the drilldown, e.g. show only categories and then show subcategories after?
Truth is that users probably would prefer the dropdown with all the categories and second level subcategories, despite the link number and placement.
-
Someone has an answer to this simple question? I have the same doubt.
-
My question is mostly directed about the impact on search engines, not about clickthrough ratios, etc. although I appreciate the comments. I've decided to potentially offer a submenu on the top horizontal area instead of optionally placing it on the side, which may not be as obvious. Some say it's fine there but let's say the submenu seemed like a good offering. The issue is whether all those links placed before content will have an effect on SEO. I have seen repeatedly discussions about how having your most important content up at the top as high as possible is most important. Having this many links above the main content is a big question mark - and that's the question here:
Q: Since a submenu will have at least 70+ links in it, is it an SEO liability if it is placed before the main content on a page loads?
-
Another point is the way the menus display and the speed in which they drop down. Along with the colours of the text which can also be a very important factor in click through ratios.
-
You want to link to as many pages from the home page as possible. Gary makes a good point that people do think they have to choose a child menu item when they see a dropdown.
But as a SEO point of view drop downs are fine. And as I said get as many pages linked from the home page as possible
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank -
I would say you will not have any problems from an SEO point of view but from my experience showing new clients and people new to sites with the drop down menus they can be misleading.
The drop down reveals the pages but the main page that is acting as the parent of the other pages is sometimes overlooked as people don't realise they can still click on that.
I speak to people on the phone - hundreds of people and show them sites and time and time again I have to remind them they can click on the main parent button .
We are considering changing this as a result.
-
I believe that google is smart enough to tear the wrapper off of a website in a way that leaves naked content.
While a lot of people do what you are proposing and may gain some benefit from it, I think that the benefit is very small.
It's another case (in my opinion) of allowing the minute details of SEO to have an undo level of control over how you run your website.
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
-
Job Board SEO
Hello community, Should I be using canonical tags on every job posted on my job board and also every job category page? I currently use no canonicals on my job board but I still rank well organically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SO_UK1 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Are ALL duplicate title tags bad??
We’ve had some success recently by reducing the number of duplicate title tags on our website. We have managed to fix all the simple cases but there are a number of stubborn examples that we don’t know how to fix. A lot of the duplicate tags come from the website’s forums. Many questions have been asked multiple times over the years where the user has phrased the question in the same way. This has led to many cases where different forums posts have the same title tag. For example, there are six title tags with the words ‘’need help”! These are being highlighted as duplicates and currently we have several thousand of these. Would this be a problem? I’d be tempted to say that we should leave them as they don’t seem unnatural to me. One solution other solution we are considering is to append the forum name to the question to any post after the original, falling back to appending the date if that doesn’t distinguish it. Do people think that this is a good solution to implement or would it be better to leave these duplicate title tags as they are? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Help with homepage SEO please
Hi I have been looking after this site www.kids-academy.co.uk for 3 weeks now. I spotted that links were a major problem with the site and started to strip out the black hat inbound links straight away. I have also been doing some onsite optimisation for the main areas I have been asked to focus on. This saw results within a week for the subpages which is great. however, the design of the site meant there were no landing pages for the categories and the menu is a permanent "fixture" called a megamenu. I have advised /landingpages were needed not only for the ease of the end user to find what they need but also for SEO. Now the issues I have are that due to the menu style, it sees every one of those links within the homepage - over 200 links! I am wondering if I should nofollow some of them, or get them to change the style of the menu as surely this is having a direct result on the homepage and landing pages just not being seen at all within Google (as normal - Bing and Yahoo love the site). There is a lot of work to do on this site, but I would have thought to have seen some movement on the homepage at least by now. Any help is much appreciated. (Please note, there are some duplicate pages on there at the moment as I amalgamated some of the pages together last night and need to redirect these but I am having issues with redirect loops so those are not a contributing factor as this is a recent change). Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeanneSEO
Leanne0 -
Changing Servers + Effect on SEO
Hi, I am currently with a very slow server. Our website takes quite a while to load, FTP is very slow and content changes with Wordpress are slow because even the database connection takes a lot of time. However, my website ranks very well. Traffic has doubled in the last year. Our domain has been registered with this company for over 10 years. I am wondering if changing to a different hosting provider would have an effect on my rankings due to the change in IP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MangoMan160 -
Google Adsense Good for SEO?
Is there any merit to the statement that Google will give some SEO value to sites that display Adsense? Or is there absolutely no SEO value for or against a site that displays Adsense Ads? Clearly, it would benefit Google's finance to give at least a small boost to sites that display Adsense, but do they do it? My guess is no, but I'm wondering ...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold0 -
Advertising links hurt SEO?
I'm working with a publisher who said that having DFA links on his site will hurt his SEO. He is taking my link and pointing it back to his site and then to mine. Does that sound right to you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GFTMarketer0 -
Your Biggest SEO Jobs Explained
What have been your most proudest moments in SEO ? What would you consider as being you best achieved job and in what industry was it achieved it. What are the reasons you have this down as your biggest achievement ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0