improving-google-quality-score-with-hidden-navigation

If you have a quick read of a post I did back in August called “Content Stuffing Your Landing Pages…“, you’ll learn how to hide content with hidden div tags and css stylings.

Taking that same process a step further, you could do exactly the same thing and hide navigational menus that will help the Google bot spider your site, but at the same time, not give unnecessary links to follow for your real visitors.

Google wants to see links to a terms of service, page contact us, privacy policy. Also, having an xml sitemap, links to other internal pages such, and a few outgoing links to high quality resource sites can all improve your quality score. But depending upon the style of landing page you use, these links can be unsightly and lead to visitor “leakage”.

My typical landing page structure includes as many external calls to to php files as possible. This makes it easy to have a central location from which to update code on multiple pages. For example, lets say my navigational menu across all pages looks like this:

Home | About Us | Contact | Disclaimer | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Sitemap | Wikipedia Link | Resource Page

If I included the html code for this structure on each of my landing pages on my site, it could be quite cumbersome if I need to change a link (for example the Wiki article), not to mention prone to error. If I had 15 landing pages, I’d have to edit 15 html files individually to change a single link. Instead, I can put the same code into a file called “navmenu.php”. Then when I wanted to use it on my site, I’d call it:

<?php include_once(”http://yourdomain.com/inc/navmenu.php”) ?>

And when I want the bots to see my nav menu, but hide it from my real visitors, I’d create a div tag called “navigation”, set its attributes in my external css file to hide the content:

<div id=”navigation”>
<?php include_once(”http://yourdomain.com/inc/navmenu.php”) ?>
</div>

Inside style.css:

.navigation {
display: none;
visibility: hidden;
}

A search engine bot that comes to your site first reads your opening document type and html tags. It then reads code left to right. So what I like to do is include a call to a navigational menu right near the top of my landing page.

So after my closing </head> tag, I’d have my opening <body> tag, then sometimes a wrapper. Then I’d have my header div, in which I would create my navigational div and call my navigation menu:

<body>
<div id=”wrapper”>
<div id=”header”>
<div id=”navigation”>
 <?php include_once(”http://yourdomain.com/inc/navmenu.php”) ?>
</div>
</div>

By calling the navigational menu in the header, this will be some of the first code the bot sees upon visiting your site and can quickly spider the rest of your links. (make you’re all your links work, or your quality score may suffer)

I’ll then have the rest of my content in a content div <div id=”content”>, and finally include a footer div, with yet again another call to my navigtational menu:

<div id=”footer>
<div id=”navigation”>
 <?php include_once(”http://yourdomain.com/inc/navmenu.php”) ?>
</div>
</div>

So the bot visits my site, spiders my “required pages” via my hidden navigation in the header, as well as in the footer. From my experimentation with this, I’ve seen improved quality score and time in which my pages get indexed. As an added step to help Google spider my site quickly, once I create an XML sitemap, I’ll manually submit it to Google’s sitemap submission service.

Since the code posted above may not make perfect sense scattered throughout the post, I’ve included a sample landing page that you can use as a template and modify:

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Filed under: Blackhat • Google • Landing Pages • Tutorials

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