Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

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lip420
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Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by lip420 » Sun Oct 07, 2012 8:03 pm

Hi~
The majority of pages on my site are in a hidden menu. They link to other pages on the page. So maybe they are not actually "hidden".

I don't use any drop down menus. Basically to get to the page they follow links that are posted on pages.

What do you think?

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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by flashgordonweb » Sun Oct 07, 2012 11:13 pm

Should be fine. As long as the bots can go from one link to the next, it is not a problem. Basically you are saying you are not displaying a menu, which is OK. Google et al. don't like it when you hide keywords via hidden text (white on white, etc.) or hide links in pages without displaying them, etc.

lip420
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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by lip420 » Sun Oct 07, 2012 11:22 pm

Thanks

paulkkarns
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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by paulkkarns » Mon Oct 08, 2012 11:33 am

Hi,

Not good for SEO, and also not good for user friendly

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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by Jullian442 » Tue Oct 09, 2012 4:08 am

I think we should not hide menu because it is not good for seo and also for customers and visitors and I prefer friendly atmosphere and there is no need to hide anything.
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lip420
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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by lip420 » Tue Oct 09, 2012 7:48 pm

Thanks

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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by matt_davis » Wed Sep 30, 2015 11:42 am

Hello
If you don't want these pages to be indexed in the search engines then disallow them through robots.txt file.

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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by jigneshkumar » Thu Nov 17, 2016 2:22 pm

Yes, Hidden menu is considered as blackhat SEO that can harm your ranking and google also does not like this. I suggest you to remove such links.

You should consider social bookmarking or blog commenting for link building.

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DaveOzric
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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by DaveOzric » Wed Dec 14, 2016 5:37 pm

It really depends on what exactly you are doing. Not having everything on your main menu is not a problem for SEO and I do it all the time. The best thing to do is have a link in your footer to a HTML sitemap that has all your site links accessible to be indexed.

Submitting a xml sitemap to search engines is another way to give them links to your pages.

Google doesn't care if you have a menu showing. They mostly don't want any unnatural stuff going on that appears to confuse or trick visitors.
I don't use any drop down menus. Basically to get to the page they follow links that are posted on pages.
Perfectly acceptable

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Re: Are hidden menu's bad for SEO?

Post by DaveOzric » Wed Dec 14, 2016 5:48 pm

https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... 5769?hl=en

View the guidelines for Help Google Find Your Pages
Ensure that all pages on the site can be reached by a link from another findable page. The referring link should include either text or, for images, an alt attribute, that is relevant to the target page.
Provide a sitemap file with links that point to the important pages on your site. Also provide a page with a human-readable list of links to these pages (sometimes called a site index or site map page).
Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most).

These are against Google's terms and you are not doing any of these
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356


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