I have been wondering, on http://www.wwtdd.com in the top right, there is a drop down menu for the Blog archives. Are Search engines able to crawl through drop down menus or is this harmful for SEO? Looking forward to a response! Thanks
Drop down menu navigation is usually harmful because it's javascript controlled, making it difficult to parse for the links.
Drop down menu isn't that bad at all. I've tried browsing websites with drop down menu and they are SEO friendly. Use lynx browser to see if the site is SEO friendly or not. If you can browse each of your pages manually then you're site is SEO friendly. But after browsing http://www.wwtdd.com I just confirmed that the drop down menu isn't SE friendly. Try using other script, There are script even though they are using drop down menu they are still SEO friendly. Hope that helps.
A search spider will be able to see the words in that form menu but wont be able to follow the jump links.
Visit www.gtravelsources.com, which has a drop down menus built in Javasript and Aspx. During the time without meta description tag, google read all the texts and show them in SERPs. But for yahoo and msn, I don't know.
Most spiders don't read javascript and js drop downs are a bad ide anyway because people might turn it off and they take time to load and so on. CSS drop downs are fine..although my best way is to include hard links to the pages in the drop down somewhere along in the website anyway..that's probably your best choice if you want to use drop downs..be safe than sorry
ah yes, flashy stuff is a no-no SEO wise. Sorry to say the ugliest solution is the best: hard coded HTML links.
To be safe, particularly if you're using java and your menu isn't tooo big, just add some standard text links in the footer or something to each of the menu's sections.
It depends on how the dropdown menu was coded. Preferably not suggested. However in some cases, sometimes it's just too stupid ruining a design just because of SEO. Just remember that using dropdown menus / image menus (because they sort like similar), don't forget to put those links on a footer section or similar to that. And most importantly the sitemap.
Is there a good resource or code example where you can find details on how to make CSS drop down menus?
Drop down menus are perfectly fine. SEs read the code not the page shown... I use it at my website: http://www.blacksburgpoker.com/ on the left menu. I have actually asked about this on other SEO forums and have got the same answer.
if you use a css dropdown menu it won't be a problem for search engines. this is a nice tutorial of a css dropdown menu. I like to use that ! Try it yourself [htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns]