6 replies to this topic

[mechele7]

I have a question for you SEO experts....

I'm doing a site for a small client who's driving me crazy with the navigation bar. She wants to have links off the main navigation bar that are essentially anchor links going to the same page, just different spots on the same page.

For ex. on the nav bar under the "Hats" button, she wants the fly outs beneath it to be "red hats" "blue hats" and "green hats". The 3 hat links would go to main Hats page, just land on the corresponding section.

I'm trying to talk her out of it. It just seems messy to me. If I were to go ahead with it... would it be bad, good, no difference for SEO.

She doesn't btw, want to make seperate pages for each.

Thank you in advance!

[Jill]

Sounds like she's been talking to an incompetent SEO.

[Michael Martinez]

I agree with Jill. Navigation MUST be user-oriented. It touches so many parts of the process you cannot afford to mess it up with "SEO tricks".

[mechele7]

Sounds like she's been talking to an incompetent SEO.

Thanks for your response. I think in this case, she was trying to keep the page count down. We had agreed on 10 pages for her site and she was trying to get more content on the site without paying for more pages.

But, based on your resonse, sounds like it's a bad idea in any case as it may appear tricky or underhanded to search engines.

[Jill]

It's not bad for search engines, just confusing for users.

[Hichem]

I don't see a problem even for visitors, if the links are pointing to different sections in the same page ..
are you using "id" links ?

[chrishirst]

An the world keeps turning!

I can recall having a very similar conversation about named anchors seven or eight years ago at IHY about Sharon and Roy Montero when they added document fragment links to many of their pages.