: Could multiple navigation sections with the same links hurt SEO? I'm working with a site design that calls for two distinct headers and accompanying sets of navigation; however, the nav links
I'm working with a site design that calls for two distinct headers and accompanying sets of navigation; however, the nav links within both are identical. I have one header with the id "main" containing a "primary" nav; I also have a fixed header that reveals via jQuery when the user scrolls beneath the primary navigation; this fixed navigation is within a header with the id "fixed" containing a nav with the id "fixed-nav."
My question, therefore, is whether effectively doubling the navigation element in this way would have an adverse effect on SEO? Also, would it matter at all how the header/nav elements are placed within the markup? For example, the placement of the fixed header could be at the very bottom of the page, given that it's positioned absolutely; however, I currently have both headers placed in a row, one after the other, at the top just under the opening body tag.
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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?"
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