Mega Menus: SEO Concerns and Usability Pros and Cons (Intro)

In current parlance, a mega menu is usually displayed as a horizontal navigation bar that expands when hovering over it with the cursor. Unlike a normal, hierarchical dropdown, a mega menu dropdown has multiple columns, lots of links and shows all subcategory menu links to the user on first view. I was previously thinking about using mega menus on a couple of sites and took a few random notes on mega menus in Drupal, but there weren’t any particularly compelling Drupal modules at the time.

Since my first explorations, a handful of modules have made great progress and you can achieve full-featured mega menus with the excellent Megamenu module. There are also some other now-mature projects like Nice Menus, and the Superfish module, which includes mega menu support. Upon further reflection, though, I became increasingly troubled by various usability drawbacks and SEO concerns. My notes on the topic got rather long, so I’ve divided them into a series that sums up some thoughts on the usability advantages and disadvantages of mega menus and then looks at the SEO concerns with mega menus. You can see an example here from the new YosemitePark.com site (click to view full size):

You might be able to see some potential problem areas there, but let’s take a look at the good, bad and ugly of mega menus in the next post. Read on about Mega Menus and usability ——»