I've got a wordpress website with a drop down menu in the main navigation. The menu items does not link to anywhere, but rather on hover, the drop down menu displays. This is a pure CSS drop down menu.
Using the wordpress menu editor, I've assigned the URL as #, so in other words the html will be:
<a href="#">Link</a>
If the user clicks this link, the URL will change to the current page's URL with a # added at the end. But the page does not refresh or reload in anyway.
The other option is to leave the URL blank in the wordpress menu system, meaning the html will be:
<a>Link</a>
This does not allow you to click the link and doesn't even change the pointer cursor to the hand as you'd expect on links.
Now, seeing as neither of these actually link anywhere, which would be best from a SEO angle?
Will google try to index all of my pages twice with the /# added at the end and causing duplicate content issues?
Thanks in advance.
Kind Regards
Willem
Willem, Yes. According to Google www.example.com and www.example.com/# are different pages. This can lead to duplicate content penalties and can cause your links to be divided between pages as users link to both. I would recommend a different setup 301 redirect to the page without the #. There are some simple WP plugins that allow redirects to be setup in minutes without requiring use of the htaccess. Personally, I use the plugin called SEO Redirect 301s.
Hope that helps!