Rollover Effects Bad for SEO?

[DXL]

I can't remember where, but I believe I once read that rollover/mouse over effects for an image-based navigation system are not beneficial for search engines. I stopped making navigation systems where a button changes color when you hover over it a long time ago (if anything because it increases download time), can anyone confirm that it affects search engine placement?

[irishaff]

Hi,

It can do as the spiders cant read the images. One of the many things that search engines use to determine what a page is about is to analyse the words in the links on and too that page. For example if your targeting " red widgets " its probably a good idea to link to the page most likely to rank for that word with the words red widget as the anchor text in that link.

Thus graphical based nav bars dont really help with SEO , but can look pretty. One possible work around if you want to go with them is to ensure you have a site map linked to from your pages or have a text based navigation system elsewhere on the page.

[stever]

It's the "image-based navigation system" which would have been thought bad, rather than the rollover which would have had marginal time effects unless designed poorly.

As far as SEs go, as long as the actual link is spiderable, they will read it.

The difference in value would be between that assigned to a text link and that assigned to the same text in an alt tag on an image link. Nowadays, I'm not sure that the difference is as great as it once was...

[buckworks]

With CSS you can achieve quite a few rollover / hover effects that leave your links clearly visible to spiders and have no negative effects on your SEO.

[DXL]

Thanks for the feeback. On every site I do, I include a text menu that appears on the footer of each page, I was told that I should at least have text links.

Does having alt tags in a graphic based menu make a big difference from sites that don't have them? If I'm selling blue widgets, does it really help that I insert an alt tag into the "products" button that reads "check out our affordable blue widgets"?