Will two navigation components (one removed by Javascript) impact Google rankings?

[CaddisInteractive]

We are trying to eliminate tedium when developing complexly designed responsive navigations for mobile, desktop and tablet. The changes between breakpoints in our designs are too complex to be handled with css, so we are literally grabbing individual elements with javascript and moving them around. What we'd like to do instead is have two different navigations on the page, and toggle which one is on the DOM based on breakpoint. These navigations will have the same links but different markup.

Will having two navigation components on the page at page load negatively impact our Google SEO rankings or potential to rank, even if we are removing one or the other from the DOM with JavaScript?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Great question, don't have definitive answer.

My guess is that Google would use the final page source (post javascript) since this is what is does when a website adds content via javascript post load. So if you remove the links, they shouldn't be counted.

I'd test this by fetching as google and seeing what it sees as the source.

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Overall, I don't think having double links to the same URLs will hurt your SEO much. Overall consensus is that only the first link will be counted anyways.

[Vijay-Gaur]

If I understand it correctly, you are trying to present different content/navigation to different devices. It is fine from SEO point of view, as long as you are not manipulating the content ( then it would be viewed as cloaking). Changing the markup for navigation isn't a bad thing till the time your links have good SEO friendly URLs.

You should take help of Fetch as Google feature to review how spiders will look at your content on mobile/desktop devices.

.I hope this helps, Let me know if you have further questions.

Thanks,

Vijay