I've been working on a web site menu update and I would dislike doing anything that might mess up my google keyword rankings for individual pages.

This update is going to involve a new menu system. Currently the only full menu is on my index page. ie www.budgetlighting.com It's nothing fancy, just a bunch of links, but it works.

What I would be changing to looks like this ie. www.ballastlighting.com/index-test.html The links are all in the menu on the left, still not a big deal.

However, I was planning on adding this menu to every page on the website via an ssi tag and by putting it in the header for agoracart. FYI, the menu is css with only a very tiny bit of javascript to allow the menu to stay open when your mouse is not on it.

Any guess as to the what a menu (the same menu) on every page might do to current individual page placement in google?

The more I think about it the more I'm inclined to just have the menu on my index page and the agora index page (with a different header so it only appears once). That's the way the site menu is now but just in a different format.

I would like to have the menu on every page but..... If it doing so would have a negative effect I would not. I could possibly add the menu on each page by using an iframe instead (if that would be noticed less by the search engines).

Just looking for some input.

Thanks

Steve

You can't do anything to a page to change its Google ranking, except to provide valid meta search strings. As long as the URL is not changed, the Google rank won't be changed by what you do.

I discovered that the links to a page have nothing to do witrh how Google indexes it. I have one page on my site which was designed for me to bypass downloading my entire homepage when I start my browser. I am supposed to be the only person who knows it is there, because nothing but my browser home links to it. But I found it on Google the other day.

Note that your Google rank will change if someone else makes a better page. That's the nature of a ranking (which is why it is a bad statistical measure).

There are some things that will KILL your
Google rating:

- Repeating the same string more than once in your meta list (e.g. "football, football, football").

- Having things in your meta list which have nothing to do with your page (e.g. "pro football" on a page about fish).

- Dynamically added content (e.g. in JavaScript) will probably not be seen by the bots. The bots don't click buttons.