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
-
What Can I Do To Improve The SEO of My Site?
We have a website that is ranking okay but we can't seem to get past #6 or #7 for a specific national keyword, "self storage software". We are working on a more effective back-linking strategy right now, but we really are having a hard time identifying steps to take besides that. If anyone can help me out and give me some suggestions I would be very appreciative. Maybe even seeing a competitive analysis from someone else would help catch something that I am not seeing. Website is www.storageunitsoftware.com Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | kenturley0 -
JavaScript page loader - SEO impact
Hello all,
Technical SEO | | Lvet
I am working on a site that has a bizarre page load system. All pages get loaded trough the same Javascript snippet, for example: Changing the values in the form changes the page that is loaded. The most incredible thing is that, against my expectations, pages do get indexed by Google.
My question is: "Does loading pages dynamically using JavaScript affect the overall SEO performance?" Why are pages getting indexed? Thank you for shedding light on this.
Cheers
Luca0 -
AJAX and SEO
Hello team, Need to bounce a question off the group. We have a site that uses the .NET AJAX tool kit to toggle tabs on a page. Each tab has content and the content is drawn on page load. In other words, the content is not from an AJAX call, it is there from the start. The content sits in DIV tags which the javascript toggles - that's all. My customer hired an "SEO Expert" who is telling them that this content is invisible to search engines. I strongly disagree and we're trying to come to a conclusion. I understand that content rendered async via an AJAX call would not be spidered, however just using the AJAX (Javascript) to switch tabs will not affect the spiders finding the content in the markup. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | ChrisInColorado0 -
Have hostings location an impact on SEO
Hello everybody 🙂 I know, that some years ago it was important that you host your site in the same country where your target audience was in relation to SEO. Because Google used that to find out which country your target audience was. But is this still important and have it an influence today regarding to SEO? Hope there is someone who can help 🙂
Technical SEO | | JoLinda910 -
My Website Ranking is terribly drop
So sorry I really need your all help 😞 I'm really frustrated and stressed. For my website http://www.cma-academy.edu.sg , it has been ranking on Google 1st page (with the keywords "design course/design courses") for the past over 6 months and the traffic was really good... But it has been almost 2 months since the big drop... my ranking all is gone in just a week and now it's even not on the top 50.. While my competitors websites are stand stil. 😞 I seriously really want to cry because of this.. And I'm sure there is nothing much wrong with my SEO to be abandoned by Google like this and Google still index my webpage, but the crawling rate is so much slow than before.. I really need some help from the expert, especially from seomoz.. Please help me in this, I'm willing to answer any questions as well...
Technical SEO | | AngieDang0 -
Doing SEO for site that publishes articles everyday?
Hi, I was wondering on the best way to do SEO for a site that publishes articles daily. In other words, I add a new url to my site daily. How should I ensure that the new pages are optimized? Do I need to submit each new site to search engines? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | waltergah0 -
The impact of mulstisite wordpress on seo
hi there, i would talk about a specific topic: The impact of mulstisite wordpress on seo Do you think that penalize seo activity ? i make you an example : a wordpress network of sites, domain based let the possibility to manage two domain on a single wp install, but even if the domains are separete, how does google see them, as separate or as a sigle domain?
Technical SEO | | guidoboem0 -
SEO Checklist
Ok I know that this would be a huge over-simplification but I am wondering if there is (at least a bird's eye view) a checklist of SEO do's and dont's? I checked to see if something like this existed but could not find one. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks~
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0