Should I use CSS to hide a duplicative menu or does it need to be removed from the page source for SEO?

Question

The only thing I have in my sidebar menu is a navigation menu and the only thing that makes that navigation menu unique is a link to my contact form instead.

I think to remove the burger-sidebar (mobile-desktop) menu in my website altogether and to link to my contact form from a sticky contact menu on the bottom of the browser window.

I can remove the sidebar with PHP but I prefer to avoid that because I want to keep my content management system template files all-core, but I can also disable it with CSS (display:none to the sidebar and then fixing the margin of the main content area).

Is it problematic to remove a sidebar with CSS? Say, by SEO? Might it be defined "problematic" by a crawler?

Answer 1

Technically speaking it's not ideal to use display: none to permanently hide content that will never be shown to the user. However there are so many legitimate reasons to use display: none, especially around navigation features, that as long as you are not abusing it in an obvious way to stuff keywords, there is an approximately 0% chance that you would run into any kind of real SEO issue by doing this.

There's no good way for googlebot to tell that you are hiding this content as a shortcut to removing it from the page's HTML ("bad"), rather than it just being some sort of complicated code mechanism to show some sort of fancy navigation to the user when certain circumstances are met.

So in short, it might not technically be in the spirit of proper SEO, but I really don't think it's possible for you to run into any issues by simply hiding a menu. I certainly won't tell on you.