Right. So @Raki could alter their code to remove the hrefs from the has-child links, OR you could fix the links you’re putting into Ghost’s navigation panel to be actual links, even though they will not be clickable by the user.
Yes, I could add another 8 pages to make good the huge SEO impact this has, however for best practices going forward, I’d encourage @Raki to do as you suggested, because the impact is far reaching and can tank your rankings. Some folk don’t even dig into SEO like this and might not know the implications of using this plugin on their rankings and domain authority.
Meanwhile, I guess I’m going to have to make this good for myself.
Thanks for your input. Appreciate your time again.
The facts are this [has-child] SEO error has resulted in 955 broken links across this site. So if @raki could make this a priority fix, I’d appreciate it. [I have emailed @raki for support, aside from this thread now.]
The Dropdown Menu Plugin dynamically changes the link of items with has-child status after the site loads. This works for visitors navigating the site, but search engines typically crawl the raw HTML before any JavaScript runs — so they still see and try to follow the original links (e.g., /intro/), even if those links are meant only for navigation structure.
The practical solution would be to change the link of these has-child items to #. That way, they won’t point to non-existent pages, and search engines won’t attempt to crawl them as if they were real content.
