Click To Reveal vs Rollover Navigation Better For Organic?
-
Hi,
Any thoughts, data or insights as which is better in a top navigation... click to reveal the nav links or rollover to reveal the nav links? Regular content in an accordion (click to reveal) is evidently not best practice. Does that apply to navigation as well?
Thanks! Best... Mike
-
Interesting UX question. Short answer; click menu is best, but its not black and white.
Naturally its more subtle than that. You mention regular content. Regular content being hidden by any mechanism is naturally not too user friendly. Accordions can often be overlooked, text hidden in the hover state of images is a client favourite that is also terrible UX practice. The mechanism doesn't matter too much - its the fact content is hidden by an un-signposted mechanism. The author knows its there, but your visitor will not.
Menu isn't content though; its a different beast. A menu needs to exhibit good information hierarchy. We try to keep our main menu to 7 items or less, essentially for clarity of the first tier of offerings. This can often necessitate sub-menus. Sub-menus are hidden content, we're just arguing the toss about mechanism. So first off we'd suggest a nice little signpost like a downward arrow to show which main items have sub-menus
Also note we don't have hover states on touch devices, so unless you're planning on a second type of menu for that, your choice is made for you and it'll certainly need to be selection rather than hover based.
Select to get something is more in keeping with how everything else on the web works; text links, buttons etc. Hover feels more immediate but if your site demographic is broad, bear in mind that the dexterity required will elude a percentage of your audience. Consider the accessibility implications of this and your site client needs.
For example, hover menus can be a real pain when the sub-menu content is wider than the trigger area. This will have happened to all of you; hover over the main menu item, see the sub-menu item you want, move the mouse to select the sub menu item... o dear the sub menu has disappeared on you. You left the hover area before reaching the sub menu and the hover state is lost. As well as accidental deactivation its quite possible to get annoying accidental activation with hover too.
As well as audience consider the sub-menu itself. If you have a couple of small items consider hover, a massive mega-menu will nearly always be better toggled by selection. On that note, if you're using mega-menus consider Nielsens excellent guide here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mega-menus-work-well/
PS: I'd encourage everyone to start thinking about selection rather than 'clicks'. I still slip up myself, but clicks are an outmoded, desktop-centric term that is very dangerous to bandy about when making responsive websites. Much as your anchor text should never be "Click here" we should always be thinking about "selection". Selection speaks to intent and action rather than physical methodology, as that methodology can be clicking, yes, but also tapping, voice command, keyboard based, etc.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Which one is better?
We are creating a new website and got stuck while deciding the URL structure. Our concern is which url is better in terms of SEO i.e. pune.fabogo.com/spa or fabogo.com/pune/spa and why. Also which one would rank faster if someone searches for spas in pune if both pages are same.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabogo_marketing0 -
Does 301 vs 302 matter when dealing with "social signal"?
When looking at links and how search engines look at "social signal," does it matter if a link is 301 vs 302? In addition to that, if I build out my own short URL system that gets used for link redirects that include referral attributes, would/could I get penalized if I use 301 instead of 302?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
GEO IP Redirects affecting Organic Rankings
Not sure if anyone has ever had this problem. We have a client who is a UK based retailer with a large retail presence in Canada and a U.S site as well. For the past year while keeping track of their rankings, they steadily ranked #1 for their brand term on Google.CA. At the end of June we implemented a GEO IP redirect for U.S visitors to be redirected to the U.S site if they clicked on the .CA listing. Over the next two weeks the ranking for the single branded keyword went from #1 to completely off the top 50. Could this have possibly happened due to the GEO IP redirect? The .CO.UK site has always been top 3 in the organic listing and is still #1 but in Google.ca the Canadian site has dropped off completely after consistently ranking #1.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | demacmedia0 -
Faceted Navigation and Dupe Content
Hi, We have a Magento website using layered navigation - it has created a lot of duplicate content and I did ask Google in GWT to "No URLS" most of the querystrings except the "p" which is for pagination. After reading how to tackle this issue, I tried to tackle it using a combination of Meta Noindex, Robots, Canonical but still it was a snowball I was trying to control. In the end, I opted for using Ajax for the layered navigation - no matter what option is selected there is no parameters latched on to the url, so no dupe/near dupe URL's created. So please correct me if I am wrong, but no new links flow to those extra URL's now so presumably in due course Google will remove them from the index? Am I correct in thinking that? Plus these extra URL's have Meta Noindex on them too - I still have tens of thousands of pages indexed in Google. How long will it take for Google to remove them from index? Will having Meta No Index on the pages that need to be removed help? Any other way of removing thousands of URLS from GWT? Thanks again, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How much better are these backlinks ?
How Much better is a do follow backlink from these 3 pages PA of 28 with 12 outbound do follow links compared to a PA of 31 with 16 out bound links ? Compared to a PA of 42 with 35 out links ? How different would the link juice be from these 3 pages with the do follow links as described ? What has been your experience ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Very basic - domain authority vs page authority
what does that mean and how is that information valuable? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirsty31 -
Am I losing link juice with 302-redirected faceted navigation?
My site has faceted navigation that allows shoppers to filter category page results by things brand, size, price range, etc. These pages 302 redirect to the same page they came from, which already include canonical meta tags. I added the rel="nofollow" attribute to the facet links and added the line "Disallow: /category_filter/" to robots.txt. One of our SEO consultants told me that this is likely diluting the potency of the page's link juice since they are divided among all the page's links, including the links I am instructing crawlers to disregard. Can anybody tell me whether I am following the best practices for links that redirect to the same page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TahoeMountain400