Yesterday, we explained the value of footer links on your website. Today we'd like to talk briefly about header navigation links and menus.
In a Google training video last year, it was explained that Google didn't penalize you for putting a small amount of hidden text on your site when that that text is part of navigation or interactive information. We wrote a Daily Nugget about that video earlier this year.
In that training video, Google didn't say how much, if at all, of that hidden information would be use for ranking, and at the time we didn't have any valid data either, but we do now.
Using Google's SERP preview feature in recent testing, we've consistently noticed that jewelry websites don't rank at all for words hidden in dropdown menus. Our tests were far from scientific, but the results were consistent across several sites.
Here's how we tested: 1. Found a few jewelry sites that use similar features for hidden dropdown menus that appear when hovering. 2. Looked at the words used in the dropdown menus. 3. Searched for several of the word phrases from the menus. 4. Looked at the Google Preview and the Google Cache pages.
In all cases we tested, words hidden in the menus did not rank, but words hidden in the menu that also appeared within visible copy did rank. And words that were in the hidden menu, appeared in the body and appeared in the footer links ranked even better.
Years ago, we considered JavaScript powered drop down menus to be worthless and never recommended them in design. Few people use those old JavaScript menus any more since they were replaced with more efficient CSS versions.
Unfortunately it seems that, just like before, Google is still discounting any links and phrases from the hidden CSS menus. Our conclusion is that hidden menus are good for design, but bad for SEO.
As a final note for today, please don't jump to any other conclusions about hidden page text because our testing was only conducted with dropdown menus.
0 Comments on Front Line SEO: Devilish Dropdown Menus
Post a Comment
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
BEHIND THE SCENES jWAG is Free!
There's a lot of good SEO training stuff out there, but we're the only website who use jewelry terms in our examples...
jWAG is the research and training department of JewelerWebsites.com, and we provide our online training for free. No scam, no gimmick, everything you read on jWAG
is the same SEO and online marketing techniques that we provide our paying customers.
Our Daily Golden Nugget email subscribers are occasionally offered free services so we can evaluate new SEO techniques and emerging web technologies.
A typical SEO firm will request you fill out a "quote form" before they tell you exactly what they do for you or their price. We know that
many of you guys--our readers from the jewelry industry--are cautious about your technology investments and media buying. This is why we've created jWAG, to
help you learn a little and understand what it takes to have a successful jewelry website and online marketing.
With a little SEO knowledge you can better evaluate any SEO firm before hiring them.
Will you have time to do this yourself? Maybe not, but feel free to hire your own in-house web person and give them the job of reading and using jWAG.
That will be much less expensive than hiring us or someone else.
We try to write everything on jWAG so you can easily follow without too much geek speak. All our examples are written using jewelry lexicon so you can use them directly
or copy the techniques directly without rethinking. We hope it's a great time saver.
If you do decide to throw up your hands and give up we'd hope
you give us a call, but before you do, make sure to check out your options from your POS company because they might have an easy beginner website. Another beginner
website could come from one of your jewelry vendors.
When you are ready to use the power of jWAG you should just call JewelerWebsites.com or do a Google search
for "jewelry website design" for the other experts in the jewelry website design industry.
Here are some quick links into JewelerWebsites.com:
