Main menu without dropdowns and very few sitewide links?

[Kuta]

So for example as you see everywhere every single ecommerce (and other) sites that have a bunch of categories and subcategories have these massive main menus, each containing lets say 5 main categories, and each of those have dropdowns with lets say 10 subcategories. And this is sitewide. Wouldn't this actually hurt the ranking, because in the end you have a product page with 5 words of unique text, and at least 50 links.

Wouldn't all these category/subcategory heavy web sites benefit more if they use only main categories in main menu as links, so sitewide instead of 50 links they would have 5 main ones. Fkors wen you click on one of those main categories, then on this page you have all the other subcategories.

Why im asking this, for me this seems like the biggest and most widely spread OnSite SEO problem out there.

[aakk9999]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Kuta!

This is a good question especially now that Google is supposedly ignoring hidden content (content not immediately shown). It is not clear whether in that case they would also ignore mega menu links (i.e. ignoring them for ranking purpose but not for the link discovery).

I dislike mega menus and I avoid them wherever possible. But there are others who moved their navigation structure to mega menus with no loss in ranking - and a very recent discussion is here:

Mega-navigation / Mega-menus: Should I move content higher [webmasterworld.com] Feb 2016

The thing is - with responsive design, most menus are such that all menu options can be reached by tapping and expanding dropdown - and on mobile it makes sense from usability point of view. But as this is responsive, this means that every menu link also exists on desktop version, i.e. that the complete menu link structure is within HTML on every page - and the question is whether in this way the page lose the focus - just as you are asking.

Below are other discussions on mega menus we had in the past. But lets not forget that the landscape has changed and that what was valid a few years ago may not be valid any more.

How does google handle mega menus? [webmasterworld.com] Dec 2014
Can a Mega Drop Down Menu create problems? [webmasterworld.com]April 2011
Does Google Dislike DHTML Drop-Down Menus? [webmasterworld.com] Jan 2011
For Mega-Site SEO, Structure is King - not Content [webmasterworld.com] Dec 2010
The "Mega Menu" Problem and Google Rankings [webmasterworld.com] July 2008

[Kuta]

Yes, you are right, Google might ignore them wen distributing page rank, but only consider them for indexing. They did mention that hidden elements are not going to be considered, and menu drop downs arte initially display:none; in CSS. There is also another important question here, maybe removing drop down and mega menus would decrease user CTR, and increase bounce rate which would definitely have a negative influence.

But on other side it might increase average number of pages per session since without mega menus user would have more. A lot of question here :) I think I will try to test this out on 2 different sites to see if there will be any significant difference

[aakk9999]

There is also another important question here, maybe removing drop down and mega menus would decrease user CTR, and increase bounce rate

A very good question!

I will try to test this out on 2 different sites to see if there will be any significant difference

I would be interested to know the test results - please do come back and post them!

[ergophobe]

That would be great. It tends to be a hard thing to test on an active site because the nav is usually a fundamental design element, so it's hard to trade it in and out for A/B testing.

You can do live user testing on mockups, but it's very difficult to measure certain things with that kind of testing. It can be hard in such tests to measure discoverability, for example, because if you give a task, you'll be leading the user. In other words, if you have a widget site and you ask the user to perform a typical task such as "Purchase a blue widget," she will likely have no problem finding that by clicking through your navigation. But will she see that you also have red widgets? So one test you can do is assign the blue widget task and the green widget task and then after the tasks are done, ask the user "What kind of widgets does this site sell?"

What you're looking for is whether users who see the mega menu have a better sense of overall breadth of the site or not. If the answer is yes, the mega menu is offering valuable info to the user even in absence of clicks through to those pages. If the answer is no, then your mega menu might just be confusing and hurting load times.

You would also want to look at not just task completion rates, but time to first click and time to successful task completion. So if the task completion is 4% higher with mega menus, but the time to task completion is 400% higher, that signals a problem. If the time to first click is very high, that might indicate that you're asking too much of the user.

These are great and subtle questions. I would love to see some results of good tests. We recently did some tests, but for various reasons did not structure the tests as above.

[tangor]

To me the mega menu is TOO MANY OPTIONS and resulting overhead due, primarily, to a lack of understanding and foresight of what is necessary.

A Widget is a widget and most folks know they come in different sizes, colors, and even shapes. In a mega menu that would be a cat and three subs, when in reality it is one item with a process select ON THAT PAGE.

Think users, not every nook and cranny.

Actually, think "cook book" and go from there.

[ergophobe]

A Widget is a widget and most folks know they come in different sizes, colors, and even shapes.

A hotel is a hotel and most folks know they have bedrooms with queens and kings, suites, restaurants, swimming pools, skiing and surfing nearby, spas and so forth, a full-range of activities for kids, romantic getaway packages, special deals... etc etc etc

A grocery store is a grocery store and most people know they have good food, junk food, a complete deli, organic, pasture-raised beef, an attached cafe with free wifi, a bank branch in the store, a full pharmacy, they are open 24 hours... etc etc etc

A ski resort is a ski resort and most folks know they have ski trails, a ski school, deals on lessons for first-timers, ski rentals, ski-in ski-out hotels, high and low end restaurants, a selection of condos, a spa with personal trainers, guided sidecountry skiing, steep skiing clinics, an 18-foot half pipe, 2500 feet of vertical drop, 17 lifts... etc etc etc

No, actually, most people don't know these things because these things are not true of every hotel, ski resort and grocery store (in fact, in the hotel example, there probably isn't a single hotel in the world that is slopeside for skiing and beachside for surfing). This is the discoverability problem with a complex product. You want the visitor to be able not only to find what he knows he wants, but to be able to find things he doesn't know he wants. You want the visitor to see the breadth of offering quickly and a mega menu might be the solution.

Don't get me wrong - I am NOT a fan of megamenus and tend to think of them as the easy route out of IA and design problems. But that's a preference and if it doesn't hold up to testing or doesn't apply to the situation at hand, then there it is.

It's all about the right solution and implementation for the situation and Nielsen sees both successes and failures with megamenus

[nngroup.com...]
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And a good article on the discoverability and cognitive load problem
[catalystnyc.com...]