Navigation Bar Links Should Be Simple And Crawlable

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

What kind of navigation bar do you have on your site? Is it effective? Does it increase your SEO or decrease it?

Some people aren’t aware that a navigation bar made from Javascript elements is not effective SEO. Sure, they look cool, but search engines can’t crawl them. You’re much better off with simple links. Here’s what I mean. The code will look something like this:

< a href="#" onclick="javascript:void(...)" >Web Page< /a >

The problem with this kind of hyperlink structure in your navigation bar is that whatever cool feature you have included in there will look good but the search engines tend not to crawl them. Therefore, your SEO benefits are diminished. Instead, you should use the following type of URL structure for all the links in your navigation bar:

< a href="http://www.thisisthepageurl.html" >Weg Page

This simple code works better because the search engines don’t have to wait for a script to run, which slows down your page load time, but also because you don’t have to worry about the search engines crawling the links. They will.

It is unclear whether Google’s new policy of following links within forms and drop-down boxes is going to affect this. Until we know otherwise, it’s best to stick with what we know works.