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11.20.09
Using Time And Date Navigation Can Hurt Your Website's Usability  By Gab Goldenberg Time and date based navigation offer terrible usability and even worse SEO. Have you ever heard of mystery meat navigation? Maybe not, but you've probably seen archive navigation that meets the following description: "Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined by usability expert Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks-or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are. "The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons [...]" Now, just because the typical forms of mystery meat navigation are unrevealing icons, that doesn't mean people can't get creative and find other ways to make crummy navigation. Here's one particular example that still exists on a number of blogs. 
What will I go to if I click on 2? Or 3? Or 11? Or 17? To the best of my knowledge, there's no difference between them except the date they were published. So I may as well click on any of those links! Or none, because they don't look especially compelling… For similar reasons, such mystery meat navigation is bad for SEO. Rather than linking internally using valuable anchor text that will help other pages rank higher, you use some useless anchor text that won't get you a single extra visitor. Similarly, it's also bad usability if you have archive navigation organized by month. We've all seen that kind of navigation: Continue reading this article. About the Author: Gab Goldenberg writes on SEO at his SEO blog. Check out his services if you're in the market for something professional. |
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