I'm helping to optimize a job search site that has an internal search tool built into its home page. As part of the search functionality, there's a fairly lengthly dropdown selector box filled with city and country names (e.g. US - Arizona, US - Illinois, Germany, Denmark, China, Australia - Sydney, Australia - Perth, Australia - Melbourne, etc.). Combined with a search term, the dropdown box helps ensure that the results are geographically appropriate for the searcher. All good, but I've recently begun to suspect that Google and others are not only seeing all these words and phrases ... but they're indexing them as well. If true, an engine might see the word "Australia", for instance, repeated 5 times on my home page and conclude that the site is associated very strongly with that country. It would also mess up our keyword:text ratios. 1. Is my thinking correct? 2. How can I prevent Google and others from seeing and indexing the text within this dropdown selector box? Thanks in advance for everyone's counsel.
I would have thought that too, but I've been using a search engine spider simulator that suggests that the dropdown list is in fact being indexed. e.g. http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php
Can I throw this issue back to the group? I'm still confused and concerned about if my dropdown list is being indexed. Thanks in advance for your help!
if the dropdown menu is javascript then they cannot read it. I use css based drop down menus and they index and follow the links fine.