How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?
-
We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO?
My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this?
An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/
-
So, is a flat structure bad for SEO? I mean, it's the pages in the "bottom" of the site structure that are the most important ones...
Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. It depends upon a lot of factors, mostly the size of your site, your goals and the relative amounts of competition that your pages are up against.
Anybody who gives you an answer here is guessing. This is one of the most important strategy decisions that a webmaster can make and a good decision would require an evaluation of your site, keyword competitiveness research, plus information about your business.
On top of that the ideal structure of your site can change over time as it becomes more powerful or as your competitors become more powerful. New sites often do best with a narrow structure and then can go flatter and flatter as they gain power.
It would be best to hire someone who really knows link structure and competitive analysis if you want a good evaluation of this.
-
Hi Richard,
The link to the phone website was just to show an example of what I mean by a "mega drop down". I can give you the link to our website of course but there is no mega drop down yet so there is nothing to see
-
Thank's EGOL!
Yes, I suppose the site will be very flat, but I think that's exactly what our product looks. We sell holiday packages to a lot of different countries/destinations and they are almost equally valuable.
It's also hard to categorise them in submenues. In that case we will end up with the same structure we have today (one page listing all the countries, when I click on a country I get to a country page listing all the destinations for that country, then I click again and get a list of all hotels in that specific destination etc). And it takes a lot of clicks to get to the actual page you are looking for...
So, is a flat structure bad for SEO? I mean, it's the pages in the "bottom" of the site structure that are the most important ones...
-
I am not a huge fan of this type of menuing, but rather categories to products type linking. I don't think Google is going to care as long as you do not have too many links within the page. If you keep this style, you will have to gain even more links to deep pages to strengthen them.
**Your company is a tour operator, yet the linked site is a phone website? Why not give us a link to your site? **
-
Wow, that is a huge dropdown menu!
If the links in the drop down are crawlable then the result of this will be a very flat site architecture with your linkjuice spread widely across lots of pages. The opposite would be to have only a few links in your persistent navigation and the result of that would be to send lots of linkjuice into your main category pages or whichever pages you include in your persistent navigation.
My sites usually have a lot of links in the persistent navigation so having a huge number of links in the dropdown would not change the performance of my site. If your site competes against lots of low to moderately powered pages then this architecture might do well for you.
One concern that I have is with usability. How will the visitor know that there is an enormous navigation hidden in the drop down? This phonehouse site has an oversized navigation bar and that might help call attention to it... or you could use downarrows to signal that there are more links beneath.
I ran spider simulator on the phonehouse site and it looks like the links in that dropdown are crawled.
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
-
Could the EMD update affect my domain?
My domain is: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/ "Scrabble Dictionary" is a huge keyword in my niche where I used to rank top 4. Do you see this domain as possibly being hit by the EMD? My Google Analytics does not show that I was initially hit back in Sept 2012 when it first same out.
Technical SEO | | cbielich0 -
Personalization software and SEO
Hi guys, I'm just testing a personalization software in our website, basically changing the "location" text depending on the user's IP. I can see in my software that when the Google bot comes to our site the personalization software triggers an action changing the location based text to "California". Can this make Google understand that our website targets only users in California and thereof hurt our rankings in other locations nationwide? I'll appreciate your opinions.
Technical SEO | | anagentile1 -
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
Am I doing SEO test properly?
Hello, I just created a page for researching the impact of social signals on Google ranking (in Italy). Page was not optimized (one internal backlink, no other external/internal links, keyword repeated 4 or 5 + h1 h2, no alt tags), and only social signals are being stimulated (through votes). The domain is 2 months old and is already positioned for few relevant keywords, but from 2 page down. My question is: am I doing right? Is this a good way to proceed? And if not, what I should do instead? Thank you for an advice. Eugenio
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Wordpress Problems.. SEO-Yoast is Toast?
Hello; I have installed the WP Yoast Widget in my Blog, and 2 weeks, after my issues went away, they came back X's 300! lol So I uninstalled it, and my issues obviously got worse, and then I re-activated, and reset everything, and still got the 300+ issues. Is there a secondary plug in you would suggest, to run at the same time as Yoats, or theat will fix all issues? Ever think of making an SEOmoz Widget for WP since it is gaining so much popularity?? Thank you Great work by the way! Loved the Webinar today!
Technical SEO | | smstv0 -
How does a sitemap affect the definition of canonical URLs?
We are having some difficulty generating a sitemap that includes our SEO-friendly URLs (the ones we want to set as canonical), and I was wondering if we might be able to simply use the non-SEO-friendly, non-canonical URLs that the sitemap generator has been producing and then use 301 redirects to send them to the canonical. Is there a reason why we should not be doing this? We don't want search engines to think that the sitemap URLs are more important than the pages to which they redirect. How important is it that the sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs? We would like to find a solution outside of the generation of the sitemap itself as we are locked into using a vendor’s product in order to generate the sitemap. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | emilyburns0 -
Best SEO strategy for a site that has been down
Because of hosting problems we're trying to work out, our domain was down all weekend, and we have lost all of our rankings. Doe anyone have any experience with this kind of thing in terms of how long it takes to figure out where you stand once you have the site back up? what the best SEO strategy is for immediately addressing this problem? Besides just plugging away at getting links like normal, is there anything specific we should do right away when the site goes back up? Resubmit a site map, etc? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OneClickVentures0 -
SEO Friendly Calendar System
Does anyone have a recommendation for a calendar system that is SEO friendly? I have been using Helios Calendar but the current version lacks proper SEO bones (canonical URLs, mini calendar generates links to empty events from 1950 to 2020, 302 re-directs, and it is generating thousands of crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools. The developer has plans to implement some fixes, and I would rather not rip apart what is currently there to fix core issues. I have found that calendars in general are a nightmare. If anyone has any suggestions, or has experience in tidying up Helios I would be interested. Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | DanLaBate0