Adding Drop Down Menus

[Christopher_Wi2]

Hi there,

We have a homepage navigation with one drop down menus that contains a number of collections. I'm looking at adding another seperate drop down menu to the navigation so that I can move one or two of the collections from the exsisting menu to the new one. 

However the collection that I would like to move from the old menu has a good ranking via google. Will this impact the ranking if I move it to a new location? What would be the best way to move this collection without impacting the exsisting ranking?

Thanks in advance!

[Shrikant_Kale]

Hi Christopher, You should do a 301 redirect from older URL to new one, it ensures that the search rankings reamain unaffected and users get redirected to new URLs as required. More details here.

[Car_Care_Produc]

Hey Christopher,

As Shrikant said, you have to do redirection. But still, it will affect your rankings. If you keep the old URL in the new drop-down, then only it will be not affected.

But if you are creating new drop-down that means your category will be changed. 

We faced the same problem for our car care products store, at that time we contact the SEO experts and they Suggested us to use the canonical tag.

That is the only option by which your rankings won't be affected. if you have any doubt, you can contact the best SEO Company.

I hope this helps to you.

[TomFr]

Hi Cristopher,

Just like Shirkant recommended, a 301 redirect is the best way for Google to understand you did move a page from one URL to another.

However if you are just moving the position of a link from one dropdown menu to another, but are not actually changing the destination page's URL (meaning the link is the same, just accessible through a different menu), there should be no repercussions on your ranking whatsoever.

Anyway, whenever you make a change on your website, it is a good idea to submit it to the Google Webmasters Tool, which will crawl your page and index the changes.

To do so:

- Visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en sign in with a Google Account, register your website with the "Add a property" button (you need to enter your site's URL and then verify you own it by pasting a code on the site - here you can see how to do it on Shopify:https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/store/verify-domain-with-third-party-services).

- Once your site is associated to the account, select it, and choose the "Crawl" option on the left column, and then "Fetch as Google".

- Your store's URL will show up with an empty box by its side. Complete the box with the remaining part of the URL for the pages you have moved. Then click "Fetch".

- Google will visit your site with a bot, and it will deliver a short report. If you want Google to index it, click "Request Indexing".

- Verify you are not a robot (unless you are a robot), then click "Crawl this URL and its direct links", and google navigate through your site, follow the links, and Index it.

The Webmasters tool is also great to find any problems that may be affecting your google indexing. You can also choose to submit a sitemap to make things easier for the search engine, but this is generally not super necessary unless you have a huge site.

Let me know if you have any  questions! I'll be happy to help

Best of lucks!

Tom