Do Drop Down Menus get Spidered properly?

I am SEO'ing a site and was wondering if drop down menus with lots of entries gets spidered properly. Let's say the drop down menu has 10 options linking to other sections of a website, will those get spidered? How about with the proper anchor text?

 

How are you coding the dropdowns? DHTML, Javascript?

 

looks like html (this is just a piece of it):

<td colspan="2" align="right" valign="middle" style="text-align:left; padding-right: 7px;">
<table width="990" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" height="37">
<tr>
<td width="890" style="padding-left:5px; padding-bottom:10px;" valign="bottom" align="right">
<select name="club_list1" id="club_list1" onchange="MM_jumpMenu('parent',this,0)" style="width:120px;">

<option value="">NFL Teams</option>
<option value="index.php?option=team&change_Team_Id=1" >
Arizona Cardinals </option>
<option value="index.php?option=team&change_Team_Id=46" >
Baltimore Ravens </option>
<option value="index.php?option=team&change_Team_Id=47" >
Buffalo Bills </option>

<option value="index.php?option=team&change_Team_Id=48" >
Carolina Panthers </option>
<option value="index.php?option=team&change_Team_Id=49" >
Chicago Bears </option>
<option value="index.php?option=team&change_Team_Id=41" >
Cincinnati Bengals </option>
<option value="index.php?option=team&change_Team_Id=50" >

Cleveland Browns </option>
<option value="index.php?option=team&change_Team_Id=51" >

 

Google should crawl them ok, but they are not ideal to use as a primary navigation. Nothing beats good old fashioned anchor text links, so where possible try and include an alternate text link to these pages or at least the most important ones.

 

I'm actually not sure Google will crawl those, but I know the other search engines won't.

Consider using CSS and javascript. Make the drop downs a set of list items. That way, when a spider or other javascript/CSS-disabled browser hits the site, they'll still see the nav as lists of links, and crawl them just fine.

 

I would be inclined to say Google will not index the links in the format you have presented.

Google ignores JavaScript and would just expect your navigation to be a form entry. It would not treat each value as another page to spider.

I suggest you revise your navigation menu should you wish to gain optimum results within Google.

 

It's ok to use javascript to show/hide the links in a drop down, as long as the links show up if you hit the page with javascript disabled.

Note that using this as a spamming technique will get you banned, most likely.

But we've had Google successfully crawl drop downs that are built using a combination of CSS, javascript and really good XHTML.

 

what is the best way to do a menu system that currently consists of 6 drop down menus with 15+ items in each? any suggestions are welcome

 

Well the most correct way is using list items with full path URL's and good anchor text like:

But... I would completely avoid this in your situation especially for a global navigation and this is why, you want to do 6x15= 95 URL's which is way too many links per page, and also the keywords used in your links will really mess up your pages keyword density and theme.

You are way better off doing 6 links from the main page to your 6 main sections, then on each of these 6 pages have 15 links to their respective sub-sections.

 

what if i dont have 6 main sections for each? is there a work around?

 

You have 6 menu items with 15 URL's in each, just have your 6 menu items "not" drop downs but instead go to 6 different dedicated pages that each have 15 regular links with descriptions to your 15 sub-pages.

 

right...but what if i cannot have 6 dedicated pages? is there a work around for having all the links on the homepage?

 

Well if you want to have over 95 links on your home page, and over 95 extra words inserted in your page then sure but i would personally avoid that.

 

Google will crawl those links, but I personally would rewrite that to something like <div><a href=></div> and use CSS/JS instead of <option>

 

I would also use the "<li><a href="http://www.digitalpoint.com">DigitalPoint</a></li>" even though you have a lot of links i would say this is the best to use, out of your choices.

Will.