Is this type of navigation SEO friendly?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi mozzers,

I wanted to know if this type of navigation SEO friendly. Is it better than the regular drop down menu navigation?

Thanks!

Ug4MhZw.png

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It's a little awkward to tell as there is no URL to look at, but if Google is finding their way around your site, you can guess they probably have no issues.

Remember that Google is good at finding their way around Javascript menus, so these day, pretty much anything goes.

Just keep links natural, easy to follow and descriptive. You don't want to be trying anything spammy at this level.

-Andy

[SoleGraphics]

Depends. In their case it makes sense because they have too many links to have a typical drop down. Here's more content to read from Distilled which explains the dos and donts

https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/

[ThompsonPaul]

That's what's now typically referred to as a mega-menu, taysir. It uses JavaScript for the fancy display but If it's coded properly, there's a fallback version that uses regular html/CSS. (You can test by disabling JS in your browser then revisiting the page.)

Unlike Andy, I'm never willing to "trust" that search engines can handle JS-based navigation. It's just too big a risk for me. (Though his opinion is perfectly valid too). So I always make sure something JS-based like this has the CSS fallback version properly coded as well to be safest. Then I can certain it's SEO-friendly in all cases.

Jut my $0.02, adjusted for exchange rate and inflation

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Just to update, Taysir - here's a screenshot of the same page with JavaScript disabled. Notice how the menu gracefully falls back to just a CSS-based regular dropdown. This is much more likely to be consistently crawled by search engines than the JS-dependent version.

This is the standard best practice for this type of situation, both for usability and SEO. A webpage should "just work" in a basic browser, and then can add additional appearance/functionality improvements for "enhanced" browsers. This is obviously what's best for users, and also gives the (very basic) search crawlers the best option as well.

In other words - mega menus are certainly NOT "better" for SEO, but they don't have to a problem either, if implemented correctly.

Hope that helps?

Paul

zakc0AS

[danwebman]

So long as you have an XML site map and a HTML sitemap, then Google shouldn't have any issues.

The HTML Sitemap could be a link at the bottom of your page

[ThompsonPaul]

Sitemaps serve a very different purpose from the on-page navigation, Dave. Both html and xml sitemaps are essential for helping ensure pages get crawled and indexed, but they do nothing to distribute and direct the ranking value from one page to another. So they help get your pages found by search engine crawlers but they won't help your rankings (i.e. getting found by your prospective visitors.)

Sitemaps are never a replacement for quality, well thought out, SE-accessible navigation and in-context links.

Paul

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thank you guys for your contributions! Much appreciated!