Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Putting nav code at the bottom of a page?
-
Hey,
We are doing a re-design on our websites and we have run into a little problem.
Basically we need to put the nav code at the bottom of the page (so when you view source all the nav code it at the bottom) but the nav will of course still show at the top.
Will this cause any issues with our SEO? Will it make the nav seem less important or get crawled less?
Thanks for the help in advance!
Ricky
-
I have placed the nav code at the bottom of the HTML doc at times. I can't really say that it is a significant difference for SEO. It doesn't take a lot of work to do if you are skilled with HTML/CSS but I can't really say that this methodology will have a long term benefit for SEO.
HTML 5 has new tags that sites should adopt such as
<nav>and other tags to indicate what that chunk of content is. These tags are supported by all major browsers at this point. I don't know all the specific browser versions. I would recommend this moving forward where possible. By using this tags the crawlers likely will not factor in position in the document to understand the importance of chunks of content.</nav>
-
I see the value of associating anchor text with content links rather than navigation, but I agree with EGOL more than Ryan on this one. What if users are viewing the site with CSS disabled? Maybe because it's easier to view with a screen reader for blind/partially sighted people - it's not very user-friendly having the main navigation links only at the bottom is it?
-
I think that google is smart enough to tell nav code from content.
Most people who do this are probably wasting their time.
I put the nav code at the top... it contains some of my most important links.
Think about it.... If you think that Google can't identify nav code then this is like putting the links to your most important category pages in the footer. Do you really want to do that?
-
Hi Ricky, how big is this site... I have done this 3 years ago on a site I manage of about 100 pages. It worked fine from the first day. My main drive for this though was: I had one horizontal nav on top with no value links which the client insisted in having plus the beefy left hand vertical nav with the right keywords in. In the code I displaced the top horizontal nav to the bottom as and kept the left hand side vertical navigation on the top (codewise). It works wonderfully and no issues with Google at all.
cheers
david
-
Placing the navigation code at the bottom of your HTML is preferable from a SEO perspective.
I have never heard of any system that "had" to place the nav code at the bottom. I've always had to specifically request the nav code be moved to the bottom of the page. I am curious. What software are you working with that requires the code placed at the bottom?
Presently crawlers read your site's HTML code from top to bottom. By placing your nav code at the bottom you can associate anchor text with your content links rather then your navigation links, which is generally preferable. This reasoning is why I position the nav code at the bottom of the html code.
In the future that may change with HTML and other semantic markup offering the ability for crawlers to easily identify content, but for now your approach is preferable in my experience.
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
-
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
How to find orphan pages
Hi all, I've been checking these forums for an answer on how to find orphaned pages on my site and I can see a lot of people are saying that I should cross check the my XML sitemap against a Screaming Frog crawl of my site. However, the sitemap is created using Screaming Frog in the first place... (I'm sure this is the case for a lot of people too). Are there any other ways to get a full list of orphaned pages? I assume it would be a developer request but where can I ask them to look / extract? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KJH-HAC1 -
Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?
I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
Should I nofollow search results pages
I have a customer site where you can search for products they sell url format is: domainname/search/keywords/ keywords being what the user has searched for. This means the number of pages can be limitless as the client has over 7500 products. or should I simply rel canonical the search page or simply no follow it?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Handling 301s: Multiple pages to a single page (consolidation)
Been scouring the interwebs and haven't found much information on redirecting two serparate pages to a single new page. Here is what it boils down to: Let's say a website has two pages, both with good page authority of products that are becoming fazed out. The products, Widget A and Widget B, are still popular search terms, but they are being combined into ONE product, Widget C. While Widget A and Widget B STILL have plenty to do with Widget C, Widget C is now the new page, the main focus page, and the page you want everyone to see and Google to recognize. Now, do I 301 Widget A and Widget B pages to Widget C, ALTHOUGH Widgets A and B previously had nothing to do with one another? (Remember, we want to try and keep some of that authority the two page have had.) OR do we keep Widget A and Widget B pages "alive", take them off the main navigation, and then put a "disclaimer" on the pages announcing they are now part of Widget C and link to Widget C? OR Should Widgets A and B page be canonicalized to Widget C? Again, keep in mind, widgets A and B previously were not similar, but NOW they are and result in Widget C. (If you are confused, we can provide a REAL work example of what we are talkinga about, but decided to not be specific to our industry for this.) Appreciate any and all thoughts on this.
Technical SEO | | JU19850