Drop down menus?

Hey,

Check out the site from ATI (http://www.ati.com). How does the search engine handle the drop down menus? Is it able to spider them? I would assume it looks through the code and sees the <a href= codes but I could be wrong.

Thanks ya'll!
Chad

For that example, yes spiders are able to search and spider the drop down menus. That site has done them in CSS, so they are visible to search engines, and will have no problems getting spidered and indexed.

That's great. That's all I really wanted to know. Ours will be done with CSS and a touch of Javascript. Much like their menus.

Thanks a lot!
Chad

drop down select / options are cool with spiders we've found as they can clearly read the url to crawl from the simple html, what i'd worry about here is your mention of doing it in javascript. css yes but is javascript a good idea? how much will it confuse the robots if you're hiding away your urls and keywords within script elements like document.write?

how well do spiders support javascript and understand what it's trying to get the browser / user to do?

if i'm barking up the wrong tree here someone please let me know otherwise i'd just stick to x/html and css to create the dropdowns.

With a small use of Javascript it'll be fine. I'm going ot assume that the Javascript that was being talked about is just for the visibility and possibly a delay on the menus dissapearing. If that's the case there's no problem. SE's won't read it, and it won't affect what they see of the menus.

The times that Javascript ruins SEO on menus is when the menus are built using Javascript. By using Javascript to write the menu,s SE's can't read them, and the Javascript code is just overlooked.

That's very great information thank you both.

Also we are using a small amount of Javascript but mainly it's CSS driven. Great to know, and thank you both so much!

Chad

Check out alistapart. We utilize that style of drop-down on our site, and it couldn't be much simpler.

All it is is an unordered list with the links within...no problem for spidering.

Yeah I have been there many times, and yes I agree it's a great resource. However, I can't find where you used a drop down list. Can ya point me to a page that has it? Also the one from ATI uses an unordered list with a display:block.

Thanks,
Chad

Clicky

its' the left-menu...just vertical dropdown, not horizontal...same philosophy tho.

Yeah that's great thanks.
Chad

no prob.