How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?

[Googleankan]

We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO?

My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this?

An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/

[EGOL]

Wow, that is a huge dropdown menu!

If the links in the drop down are crawlable then the result of this will be a very flat site architecture with your linkjuice spread widely across lots of pages.  The opposite would be to have only a few links in your persistent navigation and the result of that would be to send lots of linkjuice into your main category pages or whichever pages you include in your persistent navigation.

My sites usually have a lot of links in the persistent navigation so having a huge number of links in the dropdown would not change the performance of my site.  If your site competes against lots of low to moderately powered pages then this architecture might do well for you.

One concern that I have is with usability.  How will the visitor know that there is an enormous navigation hidden in the drop down?  This phonehouse site has an oversized navigation bar  and that might help call attention to it... or you could use downarrows to signal that there are more links beneath.

I ran spider simulator on the phonehouse site and it looks like the links in that dropdown are crawled.

http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

[Getz.pro]

I am not a huge fan of this type of menuing, but rather categories to products type linking. I don't think Google is going to care as long as you do not have too many links within the page. If you keep this style, you will have to gain even more links to deep pages to strengthen them.

**Your company is a tour operator, yet the linked site is a phone website? Why not give us a link to your site? **

[Googleankan]

Thank's EGOL!

Yes, I suppose the site will be very flat, but I think that's exactly what our product looks. We sell holiday packages to a lot of different countries/destinations and they are almost equally valuable.

It's also hard to categorise them in submenues. In that case we will end up with the same structure we have today (one page listing all the countries, when I click on a country I get to a country page listing all the destinations for that country, then I click again and get a list of all hotels in that specific destination etc). And it takes a lot of clicks to get to the actual page you are looking for...

So, is a flat structure bad for SEO? I mean, it's the pages in the "bottom" of the site structure that are the most important ones...

[Googleankan]

Hi Richard,

The link to the phone website was just to show an example of what I mean by a "mega drop down". I can give you the link to our website of course but there is no mega drop down yet so there is nothing to see 

[EGOL]

So, is a flat structure bad for SEO? I mean, it's the pages in the "bottom" of the site structure that are the most important ones...

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.  It depends upon a lot of factors, mostly the size of your site, your goals and the relative amounts of competition that your pages are up against.

Anybody who gives you an answer here is guessing.  This is one of the most important strategy decisions that a webmaster can make and a good decision would require an evaluation of your site, keyword competitiveness research, plus information about your business.

On top of that the ideal structure of your site can change over time as it becomes more powerful or as your competitors become more powerful.  New sites often do best with a narrow structure and then can go flatter and flatter as they gain power.

It would be best to hire someone who really knows link structure and competitive analysis if you want a good evaluation of this.