I noticed that within the Beaver Builder theme you output two navigations if the user wants a sticky nav. This raises a number of SEO concerns with the duplicate links being output on every page load. Why not simply use a sticky nav like bootstraps and toggle a class? See:
Shrinking the header works fine when the logo is inline with the nav, but when it’s stacked, the header still remains quite large. One solution that comes to mind is to shrink it for the inline layout and keep it the way it is for the others. Or we could look at building the fixed header with JavaScript so it’s not in the initial markup.
I’m curious though… does having double the links like this really affect SEO (the second set is hidden via CSS)? We’ve successfully ranked a number of BB sites (including this one) without any issues. I know a fair amount about SEO, but I’m no expert!
You know I’m no SEO expert myself but have been involved in projects with more than a few. Typically, they have no idea either… they read something somewhere that multiple links “dilute” the ::insert SEO term here:: “link juice” per page. Personally, I think Google is smart enough now to realize what’s going on but there may be some logic to their SEO claims. Perhaps it’s just one more little percentage point you’re taking away from their google klout. It would be nice to unclutter the DOM a bit more also… with beaver builder it can get a bit nested already.
Having a duplicate set of navigation links isn't going to change how Google sees your site much. In fact, when Googlebot encounters a second link to the same destination in a page, it generally ignores it:
PageRank is only passed to the first link
Anchor text only counts for the first link
Having duplicate navigation is very common. I’ve worked with sites that do so for several reasons:
Left column navigation and duplicate header navigation: in testing they found that users prefered the left column navigation once they were familiar with the site but that new users often couldn’t find it and noticed the header navigation more
Navigation in a menu and in the footer: Navigation in a drop down menu can’t be found with ctrl-f search, so it was duplicated in the footer for those users.
Because providing duplicate navigation can help usability and because so many sites do it, Google isn’t going to have any problems with it.
The only caveat that I would add is that it might be tempting to add rel=nofollow to the links in one of your two navigation sections so that Googlebot pays attention to the other. Don’t do that. If one set of links has nofollow, Googlebot treats both sets of links as if they had nofollow. Google’s logic is: “If the link can’t be trusted in one place, why should it be trusted in another?”
Perhaps it’s just one more little percentage point you’re taking away from their google klout. It would be nice to unclutter the DOM a bit more also… with beaver builder it can get a bit nested
I agree, Devin. Having the additional header markup has never really sat well with me. I’ve made a note to look into it at some point. Thanks for the feedback!
