Ranking disappears after adding drop down menus

[valex]

A week ago I decided to add a CSS drop down menu to the header of my site which of course has added tones of links to every page of my site. This morning the site has disappeared from the serp. The first thing that's crossed my mind was to remove the drop down menu. I can not possibly think of any other reason for the penalty. My site has been ranking quite well for the last 2 years (enough for what it is and for me :)). I'm not sure if this is a penalty actually, because my PR is still 4 as it used to be and if I search for the domain only - the site is steadily on the first place. Some of the pages which have not been indexed with the drop down menu are still ranking on the first page for their keywords. But my home page and 90% of the pages have gone from first page to +10 page in the search results!
I'd like to ask if it's possible to get such a penalty and if Google treats the navigation menus as link farms or key words stuffing.
And if this is actually a penalty or some kind of a filter has been applied?

[aakk9999]

This is not a penalty. You have basically changed information architecture and PR flow on your site, introduced many new anchors on the home page, perhaps home page lost its focus too because of it. It also resulted in spreading the weight from fewer pages to many pages so the ranking of your pages in SERPs have adjusted accordingly.

[valex]

Thanks a lot for the nice words! I nearly died this morning ;) Don't change something that's working - that'll be my lesson! Hopefully the next time G crawls my site the situation will improve :)

[freejung]

I agree this is not a penalty, but I wouldn't assume it's an accurate representation of the final effect of this change either.

Sometimes when a page changes radically (and adding so many links is a pretty radical change) Google will drop it completely out of the SERPs for a short time (usually a few days in my experience) while it sorts out what to do about the change. This may be what has happened to you.

If you really really want the dropdown menu, I would go ahead and leave it and wait a week or two and see what happens. I bet you would recover somewhat, although you might not regain your previous rankings.

However, it should also be noted that this kind of mega-menu can be bad for site architecture and ranking overall. When you have so many links on a page it dilutes the link juice passing to any one page, which can lower the rankings of your main category pages substantially. It can also create other problems for indexing and link juice flow.

tedster in particular has frequently commented on the disadvantages of mega-menu, and we've discussed it numerous times. It is generally considered to be bad for SEO. So if you can stand to live without it, I would just avoid the mega-menu entirely. Having a simpler menu actually makes the site more usable and it's better information architecture.

[valex]

Yes, I agree - I don't know what made me do this!? Extremely stupid idea! I've been building this site for 3 years now and it's got a very nice internal linking structured hierarchically and based on the old seo-siloing idea. it's been working fine until I've decided to try the drop down menu and to give my visitors a better navigation option without even thinking! I have removed the menu once and for all and I really, really hope that Google will see something positive here and will bring back my visitors :0)
Thanks for your kind comments!

[valex]

I've found tedster's post about my issue: [webmasterworld.com...] and now I'm pretty convinced what's happening and why my site's lost its positions. I simply do not understand the following: for some of my old top 10 keywords my site came back to it's old position on the first page, but for some it's no where to find or it's on page 18... I'm wondering what does it mean and if that's a little sign of improvement or on the opposite - these No1 keywords are still to be updated and my site will drop for them as well ?!?!
No sign about the issue in my Google WT though - how can someone work like that and how can we correct the errors when we don't know what the error actually is!

[rowtc2]

Google see you have modified all pages with that list of links in menu and analyze them and do not show you in results until is convinced is not spam (manipulation attempt).

Also, some ranking fluctuations can occur due the new keyword density, new place of content in source code (now you have more links in front).

If this help users, i say to let them. This increase accesibility if you have many subcategories, people find fast without many click what they are looking for, they are happy.

Pay attention if you have included targeted anchor text in internal links from menu. Try to stay clean, do not spam.

[valex]

O.K. but what's the point keeping this menu when I've got 100 visitors today instead of 1000! There's no one to click around my site :( I'll prefer to stick to the version which used to work than to wait and see if G will decide to something else. Also if once Google have decided that my menu and site are so bad what's the point trying to convince otherwise. I haven't heart of anybody who has actually changed G's opinion about a site without making any changes:)