I have a dropdown menu for a simple portfolio site, will spiders be able to understand it? The menu's code starts like this: <form action="" method="post" name="form1" id="form1"> <select name="menu1" class="pulldown" onchange="MM_jumpMenu('parent',this,1)"> Code (markup): To make it all standard html links would be unattractive...
We have a 500+ drop down menu list.The main issue for us is that every single link was classed as a new page. Hence we created a table for keywords and descp and associated this dynamically on the fly. Seems to have worked but google will not crawl as deep as it use to.
I read somewhere else these lists won't be crawled, now I need to come up with an alternative I suppose...
Google can't crawl drop down lists. You may want to create the list using JS and add a <noscript> tag for the spiders instead.
mad4 We have a drop down list and Google crawls it ok. Each list has a catergory against it which queries the db to return the key words and title/desc ok.
swapshop can you post the url to the drop down list? Google can't fill out and submit forms on the web as far as I am aware.
http://www.stefashwell.com/tutorials/entry/9/ You can also acheive those kinds of lists with css (it might be a bit harder if the list is too long) and the spiders will have no trouble crawling them
Drop down menus using css are fine. Drop down menus using Javascript need <noscript> tags in order to be spiderable. Forms with a select box are not spiderable.
I have a site with a Javascript down down menu, although I have an HTML sitemap for the spiders. The site does very well in the SERPS. There are free tools for generating HTML sitemaps.
mad4 Our Site Url to see the menu Menus on the left. Google seems to like it as each menu has a few keywords against it.
You use <ul> and <li> tags which is fine. Using a <select><option>.....<</option></select> menu is not fine.