Dropdown Menus in WordPress, an SEO and Accessibility No-No
Yazar: admin | Yayın Tarihi:
10 Mayıs 2008 | Yorumlar:
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Kategori: Kategorilenmemiş
Twice recently I went onto client’s sites to find they opted in WordPress Admin to use a category dropdown menu instead of the regular widget menu. It amazes me every time I see this. Why? Because not only is it an ugly interface in an otherwise Kickass design, but it’s also a really really REALLY bad idea from the point of view of accessibility and Search Engine Optimization. Let’s take accessibility first, since it also covers the biggest part of SEO, since Search Engine Spiders happen to be blind. Screen readers and Search Engine Spiders cannot follow links hidden in Javascript, and since the dropdown menus that are generated by Wordpress do not have a noscript alternative, that means that SE spiders and people who use assistive technology won’t find these links. From Google Webmaster Guidelines, “While Googlebot is great at understanding the structure of HTML links, it can have difficulty finding its way around sites which use JavaScript for navigation. We’re working on doing a better job of understanding JavaScript, but your best bet for creating a site that’s crawlable by Google and other search engines is to provide HTML links to your content.” People who can see but are not dexterous with a mouse may also have a problem using this sort of dropdown menu, though I admit I didn’t try keyboard alternatives. Now we come to SEO. People who use WordPress generated dropdown menus have not only hidden the links in Javascript so SE spiders can’t follow them, they’ve also thrown away KEYPHRASE RICH ANCHOR TEXT that would help their site get good serps for those keyphrases. The way Search Engines index you is to report back the anchor link text that is used to point to your pages. That’s what helps to “place” you within the WWW hierarchy, and counts for both internal links AND links from external sites. So when you toss out this keyphrase rich anchor text AND the links, it’s a double whammy against you. Purely from a geek standpoint, I find it annoying that there isn’t a noscript alternative since most of us geekytypes run with js either turned off completely or at the least throttled back via firefox plugin to make our computers more secure. Also, if you’re going to write code, at least take the time to do it right, and in this case the WP devs didn’t. Not only is the noscript alternative missing, the html code that is generated by the javascript doesn’t validate. Ugly! Now, from a usability and psychological standpoint, I, as a visitor, am much more likely to click on an intriguing category name in anchor text than I am to click on “Select Category”. So most likely it would follow that there are most likely going to be less pageviews per visitor with this type of menu system, which translates into less conversions, less ads viewed, less ads clicked, etc. So next time you think it might “neaten up” your page to use a category or other type of javascript generated dropdown link menu, you might want to reconsider. Technorati Tags: WordPress usability, Wordpress Accessibility, Wordpress SEO
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