I am not sure who came up with the idea of displaying months e.g June 2008 as a navigation item in the side bars of blogs, but they must have been an egotist  or an idiot.

I really can’t imagine a worse way for bloggers to share their content.  Sure, maybe it makes sense if you have a large loyal following who is just drooling to read everything you’ve ever written and they know exactly what month you published a particular post and they want to go back and read it.  Other than that, you’re just asking to have people leave your blog.

Admittedly most blogs I’ve seen with this structure have either below or above them a “Recent Posts” menu with 5 or 10 posts and that’s what they get 5 or 10 chances to tell a new visitor that they have some content of interest, but once that visitor scans these doesn’t find exactly what their looking for and hits the calender, they’re outa there.  No one has time or is going to look behind these hidden doors.

Where else it doesn’t make sense is in terms of seo.  The links in your menu bar tell search engines something about the content that they should be indexing your pages for.   Bang!  That’s the sound of you shooting yourself in the foot if all you have for a nav menu is a few recent posts and your posts by month menu.  That is of course unless you wanted the search engines to rank you for the year 2000 and whatever.

So perhaps you came to this post for a little advice on how to organize your navigation menu on your blog because you realized the errors of your way with your nav menu calender.  Here it is then.  Use categories or a tag cloud.  With these when a visitor clicks the link they know everything they’re going to find in your archives will be sorted based on what they’re interested in.   And yes, they are way better for seo purposes.

One Response to “How Not to Organize Your Blog”