(Entry was posted by Ashley Pothecary on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/07/2016).

Hiding Mobile Menu

Hey,

I have a question about having a mobile menu on your website.

I have a responsive website with an off-canvas menu specifically for mobile devices and a menu in the header for tablets/desktop, these menus are identical in terms of links but have different styling.

If I hide the mobile menu using Css display none for tablets/desktops will Google still read/index these links as well as reading/indexing the links in the header? In the case that it does will this have a major effect on the sites rankings?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Ashley Pothecary: Hey,

I have a question about having a mobile menu on your website.

I have a responsive website with an off-canvas menu specifically for mobile devices and a menu in the header for tablets/desktop, these menus are identical in terms of links but have different styling.

If I hide the mobile menu using Css display none for tablets/desktops will Google still read/index these links as well as reading/indexing the links in the header? In the case that it does will this have a major effect on the sites rankings?
Suraj Gadage: +Ashley Pothecary ;Google usually likes to see the difference between mobile and desktop sites. As you know Google crawls the web with different Googlebot user agents for mobile. As long as your server shows the right version of Googlebot the same thing that your actual mobile users see, you don't have any issues. Since you are using responsive design, so there are no server side differences in the HTML code served to various user agents anyway.

Hope this helps!