Menu Sculpting Plugin

This domain is a test to see if Google crawls these pages via the menu. Since there’s no XML sitemap, Google should not index them at all, according to this post, which is what this plugin does.

1. Hovered visible target URL

To stay within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, I think we may need the correct URL to show to the end user when they mouseover so it’s not considered to be a “bad” type of cloaking.

I do not believe we are allowed to  hide from users exactly where the link is going by using # in the link. The actual URL that the link goes to must show up.

If modifying the native WP menu won’t work, then maybe it needs to be a standalone menu plugin instead? I’m just not sure.

Solution?

If the the actual URL is: www.domain.com/hello_page.php
show the url as www.domain.com/#hello_page.php

YES – This would be perfect

2. More Inportant than #1 – The Upper Nav Menu is Getting Crawled

The static links on this page are verified as *not* getting crawled by by Screaming Frog free SEO spider, but the cloaked MENU links ARE getting crawled by screaming frog. Currently the menu is disabled for this reason until it’s fixed, and should only be enabled for tests. Something is happening differently between Heathers body links and the menu links modified by the checkboxes.

As of 3/22 both Test page 2 and Test page 3 have been crawled and indexed by Google. I suspect this is happening through the navigation (plugin edited) links, because test page 4 is still not indexed, and it’s never been on the navigation. It’s only had a body link below.

Solution?

Heather says this was caused because her links in the content area loads when the page loads, but the menu changes after page load. Clearly Google seees the original before the change is made, and that’s why they are finding the links.

Body Link Testing

Test Page 1 is the first one, and Test Important Page 2 is the second one. This is test page 3 – the only one that should get crawled

This is a link to  Test important Page 4 that is not on the navigation, and is here only for example and for my testing. This page is still not indexed as of 3/22, and it has never been on the navigation.

Test page 5 is a regular link on the home page so should get crawled and indexed by Google, assuming they think it’s important”.

 

History:

The catalyst to developing this plugin was this video of John Mueller explaining that Google can’t crawl them, and also implies that’s perfectly fine, by saying “If you just want to make them available for users, then sure, that might be an option…”

This is great, because a 400+ item mega-menu could be sculpted for optimal funneling and disbursement of internal link juice.