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.
Can search engines find the text in a drop down menu? Is it better to have more links or a drop down menu?
-
Can search engines find the text in a drop down menu?
-
Both Ryans are spot on. If you are not sure if it is a CSS coded menu or not, I would suggest posting the URL to your site so one of us can tell you.
-
if you don't want search engines to see the links, for example if you are concerned about too many links on the page, then put the links in a JavaScript file and block it with robots.txt
Search engines can crawl regular javascript, whether they do or not, and how this will impact your site is not known.
-
It truly depends on how it is coded.
This isn't perfect but a pretty good idea is, go to your page, right-click and choose View Source. Can you see your menu list in the code? If you can, then Google can too. If you can't, then Google may or may not be able to see it, depending on how it is coded.
If you can share a URL of your site or another site with the exact same menu system, I can offer more information.
-
If your dropdown is powered by...
-
CSS: Yes, they can see it.
-
Javascrip:. Most likely yes.
-
Flash: Almost definitely not.
-
-
If it is coded correctly then search engines can and will read the links in the dropdown menu.
-
I'm not sure what a form select is. I'm referring to the type of drop down menu that appears when you hover over the word/category title you're interested in.
-
Yes, thanks!
-
Are you referring to a mouseover menu, or a form select?
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
-
After HTTPS upgrade, should I change all internal links, or a general 301 redirect is better?
I recently upgraded to https. Of course most internal links of my old posts are still http. So I set up a 301 redirect in order to make the old link works. In terms od SEO this is good or it is better to update all the internal links to https, manually? In that case can I do it in batch with a search/replace command in the phmyadmin database? any other suggested method? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | micvitale0 -
How much text is recommended for a homepage?
I'm working with a client who is redesigning their site and the new design is very image heavy. Does anyone have any recommendations on the minimum amount of text the homepage should have so that it will rank (or at least not be penalized)? It's a site created by a known brand, but the site itself and URL are relatively new. Katherine
On-Page Optimization | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
Linking to External Site In Nav Bar
Hi, we are a celebrity site but also own a separate sports site with its own URL. We have a link to that site in our Nav bar. Are we being penalized by having that link? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Uinterview0 -
Less Tags better for SEO?
I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site. Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes. This is what I am planning: Categories - Change these to Index, but only after adding a hundred words or so by way of introduction (see this example - https://www.besthostnews.com/news/hosting/a-small-orange-news/). With the categories I am thinking of highlighting key articles as well to improve link juice distribution to older articles that are important. Tags - About half my tags have only 1 entry, with a few more just having 2 entries. I am thinking of deleting all tags with just one entry, and trying to merge those with just two or 3 entries where it makes sense to do so. I will keep these as no-index, but I think this will mean more optimal distribution of link juice within the site. I would appreciate your thoughts \ suggestions on the best practices here.
On-Page Optimization | | TheWebMastercom0 -
URL Path. What is better for SEO
Hello Moz people, Is it better for SEO to have a URL path like this: flowersite.com/anniversary_flowers/dozen_roses OR flowersite.com/dozen_roses Is it better to have the full trail of pages in the URL?
On-Page Optimization | | CKerr0 -
Is a Mega Menu with over 300 links in it hurting my rankings?
I got hit pretty badly by Panda 4.0 (1/3 of my traffic lost), and I'm fairly certain it was because Google had potentially indexed over 20 million pages from a site filtering piece of software and got done for duplicate content. I have since fixed that using URL Parameters and that 20 million is down to 2.7 million now and I have submitted a clean site map, so now I wait. I have just done a site relaunch and am trying to determine if there are any other issues. I run an online store, and I have a mega menu with well over 300 links in it - makes the user experience really quick and easy to jump exactly where you want - and then I have about 30 links in the footer. I know there's a 'no more than 100 links on a page' guideline for Moz, but does anyone know if Google is smart enough to see the same header / footer navigation structure on every page of a site and know it's navigation and not water down the rest of the links, or do I need to re-think and simplify my navigation? It's one of those things that's there for a user experience and now I'm worried that I'm being penalised. The site is www dot shopnaturally dot com dot au
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Do we have too many links in our footer?
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley. footer.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JohnTulley0 -
Alt Text On Buy Buttons
Hello, On a E-commerce site with multiple buy buttons on the page (11 by Default). Should I be blocking the alt. img on these? when I use the seomoz toolbar and view my page I see this Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • along with other alt imges on page, Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0