hello people I am a little bit of a newbie into SEO and I read that drop down menus may actually hinder indexing of webpages by search engines.Is there a way to counter this.If I build a sitemap and provide all the links to all the pages and posts in my blog will it solve the problem with dropdown menus and SEO ? regards Pradeep
How the drop-down menus are build? With javascript or with CSS (<ul><li>)? If the menu is with CSS I think there is no problem.
If you are using javascript to implement dropdown menus then the engines cannot crawl those links. But as long as the links are rendered using HTML <a> elements (usually nested within a <ul> element, with nested <ul>s withing outer <ul>s) the engines can crawl it just fine. I personally am not a big fan of complex, mesh navigation systems with dropdown menus and flyout submenus. Having links to 100 different pages in your navigation is a bad move from an SEO perspective IMO. It says you have 100 different pages on your site that are all VERY important and more important, EQUALLY as important which is rarely the case. I tend to limit my global nav to the top 6-8 pages on my site and often use an inverted (upside) "L" menuing system which combines a top navigation and a left navigation. When I navigate to one of those pages in the top/global navigation menu then I would show a context sensitive left navigation which would be the equivalent of the dropdown. Or I create components on the page which link to the pages that I would have included in the dropdown menu. I think this gives you better control of the PR flow around your site sending more PR to the 6-8 most important pages and then letting those pages send slightly less PR to the 6-10 sub pages that would have appeared as dropdown menu items for that main global navigation item. So instead of sending the same amount of PR to 100 different URLs in my main navigation, its dropdown menu ,and possibly even its flyout submenus, instead I send the most PR to my 6-8 main navigation URLs, which in turn send slightly less PR to the URLs that would have appeared as dropdown items, which in turn send slightly less PR to those that would have appeared as flyout submenus. This gives the search engines clues about which pages are more important to be crawled and indexed first, second, third, etc. It's similar to setting the priority for URL in a sitemap.xml.
As long as the links within the menu system are in HTML format, preferably defined as <ul> then you won't have a problem. I designed a site last year with a fairly complex drop down system based on the suckerfish drop down and Google had no problems following it. Always include an xml sitemap just to make sure
Too many links, particularly on the home page, can have a negative impact on ranking. I have seen multi-level dropdown menus with hundreds of links. The links end up being the bulk of the page content (even though it remains mostly hidden). Not a good thing! I try to avoid dropdowns, and advise my clients against them There are better ways to structure navigation.
Google recently announced they are able to crawl and index javascript urls, which would include these menus the original poster speaks of. Canonical's method of navigation is best more often than not, in my opinion...