WayFinder, display:none and SEO

WayFinder is using the <ul style="display:none"> to hide a lot of menu. And navigation are ’links’ which Google use heavily on their ranking algorithm since day 1. And webmaster has been using tricks to hide links in their site via a lot of methods and one of them being CSS. Although the Google guideline is saying that if it is done for the good visitors and not for the SE, it is OK, but the point is Google detect billions of pages using algorithm (not human) and it is really hard for the algorithm to know who are abusing the display:none while who are actually doing it for the ’user experience’.

So it is not a good choice to rely on their algorithm to decide if they want to penalize us (or maybe just totally ignore our link voting for SEO). We need to take control of that. A better wayfinder should have an option to stop the HTML code for the hidden links to be generated at all, instead of using CSS.

I have been following the SE for 8 years, I learn that we really need to take control and try our best to avoid doing something that the SE don’t like. We are the owner of the site, not the SE. They don’t care that that must if their algo doesn’t weighted us correctly, but we do care a lot! That’s our site!

Wayfinder does not use any css attributes of display:none;

If using a cutom tmeplate you may get something like this, but not from the default setup. If you use the hideSubMenus parameter it doesn’t output the submenus except for the current submenu if you are in one, so it doesn’t use display:none there either.

Kylej is right, it’s not a specific Wayfinder problem, but rather one of common CSS-powered menu’s.

Lovingmodx, I’m not an expect on SE’s at all, but are there any ways of pure-css to hide content (like display:none;) but in a SE friendly way? Would be worth to write a tutorial on it I suppose!

Little addon; Google did index the page on my website (http://leftblank.nl/ for the live ’demo’), such as "Quickedit", which was a link under the ’Quickstart Guide’ menu, which again, is hidden by display:none; until someone hovers it.

Kyleh and LeftBlank,

Base on your comment, I go ahead and check using another template and confirm that what you say are right! Thanks for the pointer and now I am happy again.

The template that output display:none is modxhost. The modxcss doesn’t output it.

This code was use on the testing.

[[Wayfinder? &startId=`0` &hideSubMenus=`1` ]]

There isn’t any ’good’ way to hide a content other than using CSS and what I mean is that there are people who will abuse it to spam the SE while there are really people who are using it for the user experience. Google (using their algorithm) have to decide which case is it. Whether or not to use CSS hide is depending on your comfortable level with Google algorithm. If in the original case we have 100+ links in the submenus and all of them are hidden, that is really bad.

I think you have to take it, as hopefully the SEs will, in context. CSS display properties are real and valid, just like HTML comments... the use of which is neither good nor bad, but how they are used in context and the reasons that determine whether they are good and bad.

So let’s think like and SE bot trying to make a determination....

your-domain.com
- a few visible links on your-domain.com
- several links on your-domain.com within the menu structure with display:none pointing to pages on your-domain.com


versus

your-domain.com
- a few visible links on your-domain.com
- several links on your-domain.com within the menu structure or in less likely places with display:none pointing to several other sites, many of which have very low authority, or worse are "bad neighborhoods"

Within context, I would hope the SEs will make an appropriate judgement about your your-domain.com... but, only the SEs know.

You might indeed be right identity, it’s hard to determinate how smart webcrawlers are, but I suppose you might be pretty close to the truth with your post