Best method to stop crawler access to extra Nav Menu

[DWJames]

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

[blacey]

From my experience I don't think you can really 'hide' the megamenu links from a crawler if they are generated using a content management system (code server side). If the link is on the page in the HTML then it will be crawled by a bot etc.

The general method of getting a mega menu to work is through the use of CSS and JavaScript, so you might want to have a look at using AJAX to get the relevant links from the database and then use JavaScript to put the links into the page.

This isn't a great solution, but bots cannot load JavaScript, so what they will see is only the links that are served up from the content management system.

[Click2Rank]

Ben's partially correct.  Unfortunately Google has been claiming they do process Javascript for a while, and they recently stated they've begun reading AJAX.  Of course they do a lousy job of it and don't always get it right, which just makes things even more muddy.

So from an SEO best practices perspective, you shouldn't have the menu(s) in the first place, at all.

You may also THINK their good for users but has any significant study been performed to confirm that?  You'd need to check click-through rates on all the links to know for sure.

What I've found through years of auditing sites that have such menus is that it almost always turns out to be the case where most of the deeper links NEVER get clicked on from within these menus.  Instead, they're overwhelming to users.  This is why it's better to not have them from a UX perspective.

If you abandon them and go with more traditional hierarchical index and sub-index pages, and if those are properly optimized, you'll not only eliminate the massive SEO problem but in fact get more of your category pages to have higher ranking strength and authority over time.

IF you're going to keep them in any form because you don't want to go to the extreme I recommend, then yes - AJAX would likely be the only scenario that offers the least likelihood of search engines choking on the over-use of links.

And for the record, the real current problem with all those links on every page is duplicate content confusion - all of those URLS at the source level dilutes the uniqueness of content on every page of the site.  And that also means you're harming the topical focus of every page as well.  So whatever you do, AJAX or doing away with them altogether is going to be of high value long term.

• Alan Bleiweiss - Click2Rank's Search Team Director

[blacey]

I agree Alan,

Mega Menu's are a good way to dilate the link equity of your page and in most cases it isn't needed at all. Keep the top-level navigation simple and have a submenu on all pages that contain links relevant to that section.

EG: Mega Menu could be:

Home Mens (Mens Tops, Mens Jeans, Mens Coats), Women (Womens Tops, Womens Jeans etc) Contact us

In this example it would be better to have one top level menu for:

Home | Mens | Women | Contact us

Then when your in the men or women section show links to "Tops", "Jeans" and "Coats". That way those links are relevant to the section you're in and reinforces the structure of that section to search engines.

After giving it further thought I would suggest not having a mega menu at all, because it may harm your SEO on-page optimisation efforts in the long term.