Does 'jump to' navigation work with a hidden div?
-
Will jump to navigation work when using a hidden div? Basically, we use a navigation system such that when a user clicks on a title, it expands to show the rest of the article, each title has an anchor associated with it, but no where else on the page / site do we link to those anchors.
In order to make jump to navigation work, we are considering adding a hidden div with links to the anchors. Does anyone have experience doing this? Did it work?
-
The best I can think of would be to link to the anchors from the page the "level" above.
In other words, on a category page (or equivalent), display links to the page plus its named anchors (actually, much like Google's sitelinks). It's impossible to weigh up the relative weight of links from within the page to links from elsewhere on the site without inside knowledge, but I would prefer this to hidden links.
-
Hi WIll,
Yes, I understand that 'jump to navigation' is determined algorithmically.
We can't actually link to the anchors because, as mentioned, the UI we've developed has better user engagement (one of our main goals is to improve user engagement site-wide). The anchors exist in a sort of expand / collapse format, so that the user can see the entire content and click on titles to see more.
I suppose the other option would be to put it in a hidden div, and add javascript so that the user could see the links if they wanted (even though, essentially, there isn't any value-add to the user since they can already see the content list)?
-
Firstly, it isn't automatic for Google to add links to your in-page anchors no matter what you do.
It's hard to say for sure whether placing hidden links to the named anchors will work in your specific case - but I would say that if it does work, I'd view it as a short-term solution and probably more risky than I'd like to see for limited reward.
Why not actually link to the anchors? If you think that people might want to jump direct to them from the search results, mightn't people want to navigate to them when they're on your site as well?
There is essentially never a good reason for hiding information that you want Google to find - it should be there for the users as well.
-
Mainly, would google use 'jump to' sections of our page in the SERPs. We have anchors, but no links to the anchors, and are hoping that by adding a hidden div with links to the anchors, it will activate 'jump to navigation.'
The hidden div would be added just for the sake of adding the links to the anchors--it wouldn't be visible to users. We've found user engagement is higher for the type of navigation we built, but want to make sure 'jump to' works (is visiible in google SERPs).
Thanks in advance for your help.
-
Hi Michelle,
What do you mean by "work"? Are you intending to have a way of exposing this hidden div (in a drop-down or similar)?
One of the most common uses of jump to navigation is for screen readers for the visually-impaired. I imagine that a hidden div could work well for that as they typically ignore CSS styling but I imagine it would need testing in the specific readers.
Happy to dig into this further if you have more info about your plans.
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
-
Does product environment have impact on main website's SEO
We have two environments - product, where login is necessary and where the customers are working. We also have there our help desk, Q&A and knowledge base. Pretty sophisticated page regarding information on a specific topic. We also have our main page where we promote our products, company and events, etc. Main page is www.example.com, where product environment is login.example.com . Does this product environment have an impact on my main page's SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeringaA0 -
Navigational Changes
Need some advice on when to use canonical vs. redirects for navigation changes to a website. However, if there are other options i am open to them as well. We are consolidating some navigational paths and moving others We are renaming product pages (therefore creating new product pages, CMS platform requirements) Keep in mind we have desktop domain and a mobile domain Questions Do we redirect old URL's to the new product page URL's? Do we redirect old mobile URL's to new mobile URL's or to the desktop equivalent? Do we redirect all old product page URL's containing navigation elements to the new product page URL? If we have a category page being added to two different sections how do we determine the right canonical URL? (the URL will be different because the customer paths will be different) Do we need to make sure and redirect all old URL's to a new URL? If so, what is the best way to find all of the URL's?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo320 -
Hey there, i'm working on search results in dutch.
My biggest competitor who's number 1 in main keywords in google has almost only links from 'linkfarms' and blog comments. How is he ranked that high? Would it be a good idea to add a bit the best of these in my mix, while i work on the real good quality content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ValleyofTea0 -
What do you think about this links? Toxic or don't? disavow?
Hi, we are now involved in a google penalty issue (artificial links – global – all links). We were very surprised, cause we only have 300 links more less, and most of those links are from stats sites, some are malware (we are trying to fight against that), and other ones are article portals. We have created a spreadsheet with the links and we have analyzed them using Link Detox. Now we are sending emails, so that they can be removed, or disavow the links what happen is that we have very few links, and in 99% of then we have done nothing to create that link. We have doubts about what to do with some kind of links. We are not sure them to be bad. We would appreciate your opinion. We should talk about two types: Domain stats links Article portals Automatically generated content site I would like to know if we should remove those links or disavow them These are examples Anygator.com. We have 57 links coming from this portal. Linkdetox says this portal is not dangerous http://es.anygator.com/articulo/arranca-la-migracion-de-hotmail-a-outlook__343483 more examples (stats or similar) www.mxwebsite.com/worth/crearcorreoelectronico.es/ and from that website we have 10 links in wmt, but only one works. What do you do on those cases? Do you mark that link as a removed one? And these other examples… what do you think about them? More stats sites: http://alestat.com/www,crearcorreoelectronico.es.html http://www.statscrop.com/www/crearcorreoelectronico.es Automated generated content examples http://mrwhatis.net/como-checo-mi-correo-electronico-yaho.html http://www.askives.com/abrir-correo-electronico-gmail.html At first, we began trying to delete all links, but… those links are not artificial, we have not created them, google should know those sites. What would you do with those sites? Your advices would be very appreciated. Thanks 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
Excessive navigation links
I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created). Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5 <nav>element: <nav id="access" role="navigation"> Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the <nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav> </nav> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress1 -
How to check a website's architecture?
Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
What if you can't navigate naturally to your canonicalized URL?
Assume this situation for a second... Let's say you place a rel= canonical tag on a page and point to the original/authentic URL. Now, let's say that that original/authentic URL is also populated into your XML sitemap... So, here's my question... Since you can't actually navigate to that original/authentic URL (it still loads with a 200, it's just not actually linkded to from within the site itself), does that create an issue for search engines? Last consideration... The bots can still access those pages via the canonical tag and the XML sitemap, it's just that the user wouldn't be able to access those original/authentic pages in their natural site navigation. Thanks, Rodrigo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlgoFreaks0 -
Techniques to fix eCommerce faceted navigation
Hi everyone, I've read a lot about different techniques to fix duplicate content problems caused by eCommerce faceted navigation (e.g. redundant URL combinations of colors, sizes, etc.). From what I've seen suggested methods include using AJAX or JavaScript to make the links functional for users only and prevent bots from crawling through them. I was wondering if this technique would work instead? If we detect that the user is a robot, instead of displaying a link, we simply display its anchor text. So what would be for a human COLOR < li > < a href = red >red < /a > < /li >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic
< li > < a href = blue>blue < /a > < /li > Would be for a robot COLOR < li > red < /li >
< li > blue < /li > Any reason I shouldn't do this? Thanks! *** edit Another reason to fix this is crawl budget since robots can waste their time going through every possible combination of facet. This is also something I'm looking to fix.0