I've got a wordpress website with a drop down menu in the main navigation. The menu items does not link to anywhere, but rather on hover, the drop down menu displays. This is a pure CSS drop down menu.
Using the wordpress menu editor, I've assigned the URL as #, so in other words the html will be:
Link
If the user clicks this link, the URL will change to the current page's URL with a # added at the end. But the page does not refresh or reload in anyway.
The other option is to leave the URL blank in the wordpress menu system, meaning the html will be:
<a>Link</a>
This does not allow you to click the link and doesn't even change the pointer cursor to the hand as you'd expect on links.
Now, seeing as neither of these actually link anywhere, which would be best from a SEO angle?
Will google try to index all of my pages twice with the /# added at the end and causing duplicate content issues?
Thanks in advance.
Kind Regards
Willem
Willem,
Yes. According to Google www.example.com and www.example.com/# are different pages. This can lead to duplicate content penalties and can cause your links to be divided between pages as users link to both. I would recommend a different setup 301 redirect to the page without the #. There are some simple WP plugins that allow redirects to be setup in minutes without requiring use of the htaccess. Personally, I use the plugin called SEO Redirect 301s.
Hope that helps!
This is a common issue.
Both variants ( <a href="#"> and <a> ) do the same to your SEO: They are ugly from a Webdevelopers perspective, but they don't actually hurt your site or rankings. Google won't even crawl the URL '/#'. The only negative aspect is that you have more (worthless) links per URL and therefore less power to spend for the important URLs.
My personal view
Example 1:
Imagine your Homepage has a "Linkpower" value of 100. (Yes, thats a term without meaning.)
You have 2 links on your Homepage.
So every link passes a Linkpower of 50.
(Of course that's wrong, but is just to illustrate the problem.)
Example 2:
Imagine your Homepage has a "Linkpower" value of 100.
You have 3 links on your Homepage. (Including 1 worthless link for the Dropdown-Menu.)
So every link passes a Linkpower of 33.
So, remove the odd links if you want to build the perfect website, or keep them if you have something better to do respectively if you want your menu to work in outdated browsers.
Related
This may seem novice, but I assure its not.
So, I have a site, which displays blog posts by date from new backwards.
Standard stuff. However, what I'm trying to do is create a temporary homepage, lets call it 'yogo'. It displays some ad, or image, with a button link.
What I'd like is a direct link to the actual blog feed which displays in a given theme site's frontpage. Is it just a block?
When Im in Appearance->Reading, I can change homepage to 'yogo' fine. But, say a visitor is on 'yogo', and I want a button they click on to link to what would be the original theme frontpage with blog content, it should technically be 'Home' but is that coded somewhere through the wordpress software like the Reading mentioned above.
Maybe Im missing something, should I shut off permalinks, and dig for it in actual page extension?
Im trying to avoid using Guten. or Elem. to build out a blog page.
Any advice, thanks in advance.
Once add your code in front-page.php or home.php you can use get_the_permalink() function to get the blog page URL and will pass in "a" HTML tag like this -
Your Blog Name
Might be it can help you.
Just a quick update. actually solved this.. In simple terms, it is possible to do this really quickly through the Wpress UI. From your backend, these are the steps in the following order:
(firstly. shout out 2 user 'mirchev' because if u didn't point out templates I would of been way off. actually after about an hour of research after that) So it all takes place in Setting->Reading. From what I've read, Wpress started off as a blog based system anyways, so it was solved a long time back. Basically to start, 1. Create 2 pages, no need to add any content as long as they are 'new' and you make note of the names.
2. Also important -in the template area to the right panel when the new page editor loads up (you don't need to add any texts, images or whatever, including the area on the right just make sure "default template" is selected. 3. Afterwards, these 2 pages are 2 be used in the Setting->reading section.
What you want to do is when you enter this setting of your Wpress site, instead of having your "homepage" radio button be "latest posts" set it to 'static page,' and 4. important - select 1 of the 2 new pages you created as the static page. 5. Now, also important, for the posts page, select the 2nd of the 2 new pages you created. 6. Once this is done, what happens is your website loads the static page, which you may customize however, and then you can go into your Appearance->menus and add the appropriate link to the 2nd of the 2 new pages you created to load the blog, or link to it whichever way you choose. More often than not a menu item should appear if that is the setting you customized.
..And that is all. if fact I was very surprised just how smooth it was.
good luck ! ..--'''~~**
Separation!
I have used Configuration|Site Information|Default Front Page to designate node/55 as my front page.
How can I create a menu linking to the original front page, i.e. the one with the list of articles?
If I link to <front> it goes to node/55.
P.S.: I have been able to simulate this by enabling the frontpage view, but, if possible, it would be more efficient to just link to the original front page URL.
As far as I know the original homepage is equal to /node (for clean URLs) or ?q=node. Link to either of these and you should be fine.
I need to disable parent pages in my wordpress navigation menu. I have found a few plugins that disable click-through, but hover arrow and color change are still present. Looking to simply have the parent page show as text in the menu. Here is the header.php code if needed.
http://pastebin.com/Cd4HWTTV.
Please let me know if other information is needed.
Your help is much appreciated.
Alex
I have come across this a few times before. If I understand correctly, you have something like an About Us section, but there's no content on the About Us page. You want the link in the header to redirect to the first subpage in that section, the History page for example.
The way I had to deal with this was to make About Us redirect to History using a plugin called Page Links To.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-links-to/
In most of my drupal 6 sites, I use pathauto, xmlsitemap and nodewords. I like having canonical tags for all pages, as an added layer of protection against having duplicate content.
My site's front page is set to "node/31". The problem I ran into this morning was that Google had indexed "node/31" as the front page. (It was in my XML sitemap, as well as the canonical tag.) So I installed globalredirect, and so now "node/31" redirects to the "/". I also removed the home page from the xmlsitemap. I assume that google will soon remove "node/31" from its index. All is good... except that the canonical tag still shows "node/31".
I'm sure there is an easy solution here, but for some reason I just can't think what it is. The easiest solution would seemingly be to create a path alias for "node/31" to "/", but that's not possible. I also tried to set the canonical tag for the front page via admin/content/nodewords/meta-tags/frontpage but it seems to have no effect.
Try the donwords configuration, it allows for a specific front page tags, and entering tages in the node edit forms.
one of this options should resolve your problem
Avner
#kiamlaluno yeah, you're right, it's a very localized question. It's 3 questions in one, but they are all related to how different modules interact with the front page. I could have broken it up into 3 more general questions, but they all related to the aliases.
#AgA: It's all about control. I want to control the URLs that Google indexes, and I don't want duplicate content. (Also, clients just don't want to see "node/xxx" anywhere.)
I did find a solution:
Remove the front page from the XML Sitemap. It will be indexed regardless.
Delete any alias for the front page.
In Nodewords settings, select "Use front page meta tags".
The only thing I don't like about this solution is that my site editors can no longer edit any meta tags on the node edit page. Once you select "Use front page meta tags", the only way to change them appears to be on the Nodwords admin pages.
The "Use front page meta tags" is a bit confusing, in that Nodewords was already inserting a canonical tag before I enabled this setting. Also, it's easy to enter tags at admin/content/nodewords/meta-tags/frontpage thinking they will show up on the home page, only to realize that you also have to enable "Use front page meta tags".
Problems solved.
I do most if not all my sites to have the page title block (generally a styled h1 on my pages) to link back to the home page.
Should this be linked on the first page, i.e. the home page? I read that this shouldn't be linked, but one thing I do when I go to a page for the first time is mouseover the title to check the status bar to see if it will send me home.
What I'm asking is best practises for this... should the home page's title link back to itself for future reference for the user?
While I understand the logic behind a page not linking to itself, I personally think the title block is a defensible exception. So I think you should link it to the home page, even on the home page.
See sites such as facebook - the facebook logo always links to the homepage.
It's a strong convention, and I try to utilize it where ever practicable.
There should never be links on the page that link to itself. According to research by Jakob Nielsen, this is a bad idea. Further reading here (#10) and here (also #10 in that list).