Hi. I hope this is the right place for my question. I own a very successful e-commerce site. We are a Yahoo store and currently have a left hand nav where all of the links are hard coded and look like this: Cat 1 -sub cat 1 -sub cat 2 -sub cat 3 -sub cat 4 Cat 2 -sub cat 1 -sub cat 2 -sub cat 3 -sub cat 4 -sub cat 5 Cat 3 -sub cat 1 -sub cat 2 -sub cat 3 Etc. etc. etc... Each page in our site is using the same exact navigation. This was fine when we were first starting out but now we have multiple cats/subcats and the menu is now getting rather l-o-n-g. What we need to do is shorten up the menu. I have been thinking about options and it seems that a drop down menu would be the optimal solution in terms of customers having quick access to subcats and not needing to click around excessively to find what they are looking for. We currently have *excellent* natural rankings on Google and we obviously don’t want to jeopardize that. I have looked at Open Cube's "Infinite Menus" which claims to be search engine friendly because of the use of <ul> and <li> tags. I realize that we are going to have to tweak the site no matter what if we change the nav structure. But my primary concern is with the menu that we end up using as a replacement for what we now have. Does anyone have any experience with Infinite Menus or have any knowledge of whether or not it actually is able to be spidered as it claims. I am also open to any other suggestions. Thanks in advance.
I have not used Open cube's infinite windows menu but did use their javascript sliding tree menu for an e-commerce site with 40 categories and about 3000 items. We included a sitemap and had no indexing problems with the site.
One of our sites are running into the same problem, but reverse of the situation you are facing. The horizontal top navigation consists of many <ul><li></li></ul> tags, and google stuck us in the supplemental index as a result. The engine is not smart enough to realize that it is the menu and not duplicate content.
Take a look at this menu. It's pure css (no javascript) and validates. http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/final_drop2.html