I am building an e-commerce site and am wondering if having 2 identical navigation menus will hurt my SEO efforts.
I have a drop-down menu at the top of the page. That lists main categories, followed by sub-categories.
On my left navigation I have the same thing.
Both are structured like so:
<ul>
<li>Main Category 1
<ul>
<li>Sub Category</li>
<li>Sub Category</li>
<li>Sub Category</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Main Category 2
<ul>
<li>Sub Category</li>
<li>Sub Category</li>
<li>Sub Category</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
The only difference is that I am using CSS to hide the main categories on the left navigation. Search engines will not be able to see this and will interpret it as an identical menu as the top menu.
Will this confuse the search engines? If so what if I just display sub-categories on the left menu without using CSS to hide the main categories?
Thanks in advance,
JR
You'll really want to consider the link structure on the rest of the page before making a complete decision, however, for the most part you should be fine.
There are SEOs who would say that you're diluting the impact of your other links by adding duplicate links to your page. There are some that believe that only the first link actually counts; and there are others who say the more the merrier.
It sounds like you're hiding the main categories mostly to improve the look of the left navigation so it doesn't look redundant but you still want to maintain the semantic hierarchy of the menu. I think this is perfectly reasonable as long as you believe you're improving the user experience (Ux) of the page.
The minutia that you're concerned about here is insignificant compared to other factors of the page.
Simply put, duplicating the navigation like this probably won't help or hurt your SEO initiatives. Just opt for what provides you the best user experience while taking into account code maintainability. Conversions from a better Ux will greatly out weight a small SEO tweak like this.
Making two different menus in your website is good as far as SEO is concern as Google or other search engines give value to user friendly layouts of websites. Having a menu on left side make it much more convenient for a visitor to navigate through your websites. As far as my knowledge is concern, there will be no harm and your website will work fine with search engines.
Although, you can not hide anything from search engines and they surely do not like hidden things. Why not you make an accordion style menu in which you only show main categories on the side menu. Once user click on a main category, it gets expand and show sub-categories. While clicking the same main category again will shrink the menu back to its original structure. Hope you will understand my point.
If anything you're doing only exists for the sake of bots, you might want to reconsider why you're really doing it. There are numerous resources that talk about what not to do in terms of SEO.
Related
I have read a little about this but could not find a definitive answer anywhere. So, I thought of asking this question here.
I am building a Travel Guide which has lots of information divided into tabs. Each tab has its own content and keywords which I would like to rank for in SEO. Here's a screenshot of what my structure will be:
Each tab has unique content with its own keywords,images,videos,etc. So, for example, I would like to rank well when people search for 'Top things to do in Bali' and 'best time to visit bali' and show that particular tab by means of anchored links. So, it will be example.com/bali.html#top-things and example.com/bali.html#best-time respectively.
Do anchored links have any SEO value? Will they even show up on search v/s a normal link. So, if I am trying to rank for the keyword Top things in Bali, which URL is better? example.com/bali.html#top-things or example.com/bali/top-things
Thanks for your help.
For a search engine, the anchors don't matter : Wikipedia uses them intensively, but I still haven't seen any link pointing to a specific anchored content from any SERP.
In a way, that's easy to understand : an anchor can be something like this :
<a name="my_anchor">My Anchor</a>
Or something like this, which is far more semantically right :
<anyHTMLTag id="anchor_name">my content here</anyHTMLTag>
Because an anchor can link to any id on the page.
Regarding your example, Google and other search engines will consider all of your content to be different paragraphs of the same page. If your purpose is to draw attention to a very specific zone of your page from the SERPs, that won't work.
Some years ago, when Google did not https encode their results page, a hook could have been used (Detecting the search query), but that's not the case anymore.
Interlinking is important part of SEO. Keep in mind while you creating Anchored make it in Heading tag that will be more effective. anchored text is use full to target Keywords that also important and It is easy to share your pages links.
The anchor link syntax for you website content will be equal to
<a href="" text="" target="_blank" > Your target keyword </a>
Select the target text from your content that you want to include anchor link.
I would like to place the form in the footer of the page, and use the "Contact" link in the main <nav> as an anchor to the <footer>.
Would this be fine from an SEO perspective, or should I scrap this idea and stick with a straight-up contact page? Or both?
It is fine from a SEO perspective, but since your form will appear on every page, its content will be ignored when ranking each page. So, you may want to set-up a separate contact page too if you want this to appear in search results.
I have a page that consist of a daily updated front page with every day archived in a sub-page. The sub pages are either a funny picture or a joke. The pictures and jokes have a like and share option (for facebook, stumbleupon and pinit for instance), which obviously link to the picture or joke in question. I'm puzzled what to do with the google plus button though.
What is good pratice? Link to google plus with the link straight to the picture (sub-page) or set it up to share the main page?
so this:
<div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" //...// data-href="http://www.amazingjokes.com/"></div>
or this:
<div class="g-plusone" data-size="medium" //...// data-href="http://www.amazingjokes.com/?view=img&date=2013-06-16"></div>
Thanks
I would concur with what Scarygami says, but also add that this may be a scenario where an interactive post/share might be appropriate as well. You could have the shared info go to your top level page, and a "Visit" button go to the more specific sub-page.
Really depends on what you want to do.
Linking the +1-Button to your main page will have an accumulated count for your page, while linking it to the picture will have a count per-picture which I think would make more sense in your scenario.
Of course you can have an additional +1-Button for your main page so people can show their appreciation for your page in general. If you have a Google+ Page associated with your site you could also use a page badge for this.
Let says someone has 'legitimately' hidden content within a page.
To explain this further, imagine the following:
<div id="tab-one">This is the content inside tab one</div>
<div id="tab-two">This is the content inside tab two</div>
Tab one
Tab two
From an seo perspective, assuming that none of this is done to manipulate google. And in fact, "tab two" contains spam free, relevant data, how does this impact seo?
Will googlebot index, and conciser the 'hidden' content as part of the content of the page?
Will it use this content in the same way as though the content was "visible" on the page without the use of javacscript?
Thanks.
I don't believe there's an official Google response on this topic in the past, however, from experience I can tell you that Google will index the tabbed content just fine. You'll even see SEO traffic from the content. If you're site is fairly clean, I wouldn't worry about being flagged as having "hidden content", as long as the content is accessible by user action (e.g. clicking), and obviously clickable.
However, you'll want to consider this. Say for example, some of the content in a hidden tab is a product description such as "child safe". If a users is looking for "child safe products", and they arrive at your site through a search engine, they probably won't immediate see that information because they don't know it's buried behind a tab.
Most users don't spend a lot of time hunting, so to a user they might not find the content and bounce because they don't feel like they found the relevant information they were looking for. If you subscribe to the idea that Google and Bing use search query refinements as a search signal, this could potentially "harm" your SEO.
Personally, unless it's truly tertiary information, I wouldn't put it behind a tab unless crucial to the Ux. From my experience, users don't mind scrolling if the information is relevant ... but they tend to have "tab" blindness or only really interact with "hidden" elements when it's part of the navigation or already in a transactional flow.
p.s. An alternative is to use crawlable AJAX or pushState() to have the individual tabs indexed separately on their own URLs. But you'll want to be careful ... if you're rendering out the main content on the tab "pages", you might have a duplicate content concern. If it makes sense, you can potentially use the rel="next" and rel="prev" spec that Google released (but only supported by Google right now).
In Webmaster Tools you will find the option to Fetch as Google. There you can see just how Google is crawling the page. I've noticed some JavaScript carousel libraries are crawled, while others aren't. It's just a matter of how Google is able to read the JavaScript code.
As far as impact goes, it's not like all hidden content is bad. The content is still crawled (As you will see with the fetch). Now if there was an abundance of keyword-stuffed content, that would be susceptible to penalty.
Used correctly, it's definitely still beneficial.
The hidden content will be crawled, and this is not a problem for Google, many sites have this kind of menu. I suppose the hidden tabs are not keywords stuffed and useful for the users, so you shouldn't worry about this - it is useful for the user and googlebot!
I have setup some dropdown menus allowing users to find pages on my website by selecting options across multiple dropdowns:
eg. Color of Car, Year
This would generate a link like: mysite.xyz/blue/2010/
The only problem is, because this link is dynamically assembled with Javascript, I've also had to assemble each possible combination from the dropdowns into a list like:
<noscript>
No javascript enabled? Here are all the links:
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2009/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2010/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2010/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2009/'>mysite.xyz/red/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2010/'>mysite.xyz/red/2010/</a>
</noscript>
My question is, if I put these in a tag like this, will I be penalized or anything by search engines such as Google? I've already been doing so for some navigational stuff which required offsets etc. However, now I would be listing a whole list of links here too. I want to provide them here, moreso so that google can actually index my pages - but for those without javascript, they can still navigate too.
Your thoughts? Also.. even though I have some links that appear to have been indexed, I AM NOT 100% SURE, which is why I'm asking :P
If the noscript code represents an alternative to the javascript code, then it should be fine I think, but Google does try to spot fishy seo and may penalize, so it's better to avoid doing this when possible.
In your case, consider spending some time making a drop down menu such that you can have the links on the page in a list item and use javascript + css to simulate a drop down menu, this way you will not need to use the noscript tag.
A decade ago, I made my website using image links for internal navigation (this at a time when CSS was brand-new and HTML4 Transitional was normal). I then added text navigation links at the bottom of the page.
I believe this (and your idea) is a common enough technique that, as long as you really aren't trying to do something sketchy, Google et al should interpret correctly.
I think the noscript tag is irrelevant, but having a giant list of links links may make their algorithms think you're doing some fishy SEO. Like having a wall of keywords.
Google (or whoever) would index these, and as long as you're not going overboard with a bunch of BS links I don't see a problem. Though from an SEO standpoint, it's not good to create menus from javascript or flash. I might look for an alternative that uses anchor tags with some CSS to dress it up.