Navigation for Users vs Spiders

[edmundsseo]

We're creating a new global site nav that provides a great user experience, but may be less than ideal for the search engines. The user selects an item from category A, and is then presented options to choose from in category B, and then chooses a specific product. The user does not encounter any actual "links" until they choose the specific product.

The search engines won't see this navigation path due to the way that the navigation is coded. They're unable to choose an item from A, so they can't get to B, and therefore cannot get to C, which is the actual product page.

We'd like to create an alternative nav for the browsers, so that they can crawl the category pages for A and B, as well as the specific product pages (C).

This alternative nav would be displayed if the user does not have javascript enabled. Otherwise, the navigation described above will be shown to the user.

Moving forward, the navigation that the user sees may be different from what is shown to the search engine, based on user preferences (ie they may only see some of the categories in the nav, while the search engines will see links to all category/product pages).

I know that, as a general rule, it's important that the search engines see the same thing that the user sees. Does the strategy outlined above put us at risk for penalties?

[FedeEinhorn]

Search engines are already good executing Javascript, so they WILL see those links too. I would suggest only the "user" navigation and add some bread crumbs in each product (the path the user followed to reach that product) so crawler and users can also navigate the site by category.

[edmundsseo]

Sorry, I should have clarified, the navigation utilized AJAX, so the links don't actually appear anywhere in the source. We do have breadcrumbs on the product pages. Thanks!

[FedeEinhorn]

Same response AJAX is a javascript method to get content from another page. Crawlers have no issues indexing that. Now a days, most BIG sites use AJAX, like the ones with infinite scroll.

The way they do it is: they put the link to the next page (that users don't see since you hide the "Next" via css) and both crawlers and users can navigate the site just fine. In your case, you can put links into each submenu option too, that way you will help both users and crawlers.

[MoosaHemani]

Here is the Google’s guidelines for developers that how they can make their AJAX code crawlable.... https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

I guess you should pretty much focus on your user’s experience and I believe Google crawlers can easy crawls your AJAX and JS codes...

Hope this helps!