Website navigation architectures and their effect on website visibility - a literature survey. MELIUS WEIDEMAN 1 and MONGEZI NGINDANA Faculty of Business Informatics, Cape Technikon Search engines hold a promise of delivering relevant and useful information to the human user. The primary objective of this research project is to compare and report on different types of navigation schemes, their advantages and disadvantages, and the impact they have on the visibility of a webpage to a search engine crawler. The method employed was to review relevant literature, compare the advantages and disadvantages of navigation architectures and to reach a conclusion. It was found that a number of options are offered to the designer of a website, including text-based links, navigation buttons, image maps, JavaScript, Flash elements, hidden menus and frames. All of these elements appeared to have a question mark over their positive contribution to the visibility of a webpage. The primary conclusion reached is that navigation architecture used on a website does impact its visibility to a search engine crawler. The webpage designer should exercise care in choosing a navigation scheme. One option is to duplicate navigation schemes to please both human and crawler visitors, which could add to clutter and information overload. Finally, some areas for further research are identified. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H. [Information Systems]: H.3 Information storage and retrieval; H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval. General Terms: Design, Human factors, Performance. Additional Key Words and Phrases: navigation, visibility, search engine, crawler. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION The navigation scheme of any website plays an important part in the user experience of that website, and clutter is a major obstacle in its design [Nielsen 2000:221]. There appears to be two opposing requirements for designing this scheme: one to please the human visitor and one to please the search engine crawler visitor. Some authors claim that many developers design web pages that are created entirely in Flash or with graphic images to preserve the aesthetics of the colours, uncommon typefaces and movement to satisfy users, forgetting that these pages are not search engine friendly [Lide and David 1999]. Others claim the opposite: the focus should be on the crawler, to ensure ease of indexing when these programs start their visitations [Weideman 2003]. Thurow [2002] reports that, in order to get best search engine visibility, web designers should follow the 'Five Basic Rules of Web Design'. These rules stipulate that websites should be: − easy to read, − easy to navigate, − easy to find, − consistent in layout and − consistent in design. By following these rules, the designer ensures that the website satisfies the target audience, as well as search engine crawler programs. This research project compares and evaluates different navigation schemes and their impact on search engine visibility. Author Addresses: M. Weideman, Faculty of Business Informatics, Cape Technikon, PO Box 652, Cape Town 8000 SOUTH AFRICA meliusw@yahoo.com M. Ngindana, Faculty of Business Informatics, Cape Technikon, PO Box 652, Cape Town 8000 SOUTH AFRICA mongeziw@ctech.ac.za Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, that the copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than SAICSIT or the ACM must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. © 2004 SAICSIT