Our shop site has a 3 tier drop down mega-menu so it's easy to find your way to anything from anywhere. It contains about 150 links and probably 300 words of text.

We also have a more context-driven single layer of sub-category navigation as well as breadcrumbs on our category pages.

You can get to every product and category page without using the drop down mega-menu.

Although the mega-menu is a helpful tool for customers, it means that every single page in our shop has an extra 150 links on it that go to stuff that isn't necessarily related or relevant to the page content. This means that when viewed from the context of a crawler, rather than a nice tree like crawling structure, we've got more of an unstructured mesh where everything is linked to everything else.

I'd like to hide the mega-menu links from being picked up by a crawler, but what's the best way to do this?

I can add a nofollow to all mega-menu links, but are the links still registered as page content even if they're not followed? It's a lot of text if nothing else.

Another possibility we're considering is to set the mega-menu to only populate with links when it's main button is hovered over. So it's not part of the initial page load content at all.

Or we could use a crude yet effective system we have used for some other menus we have of base encoding the content inline so it's not readable by a spider.

What would you do and why?

Thanks,

James

Someone else asked a similar question earlier today.

Canonicals are the key if you want to keep the category structure in your product URLs. Surely you'd want the book title and author name in the product name / URL and wouldn't need it from the category URL though?

Either way, we use this extension on our Magento shop which lets us control the Canonical URLs properly as well as generating some good google friendly sitemaps.

http://www.mageworx.com/seo-suite...

Hope this helps,

James