I thought I'd post an interesting snippet from Matt Cutts' blog which I thought was an eye opener in regards to Google being able to crawl your website pages, I've highlighted the important parts
Matt Cutts says..
Quote:
I’ve had this conversation a lot over the years. Savvy webmasters and SEOs know how to make a site crawlable, e.g. making sure that someone can reach every page on a site via normal HTML links. But the web is filled with sites that have a dropdown box or some other form that search engines typically didn’t know how to handle.
Now Google is finding ways to crawl through forms and drop-down boxes. We only do this for a small number of high-quality sites right now
I actually use drop down menus on one of my sites as I didn't think it would look too great having 50+ links in the footer of every page.... I realise that I am losing out on valuable anchor text but didn't want the page to appear overly 'spammy'. I think I may have to reconsider the design now
Sure, but I've yet to come to terms with making a CSS drop menu that doesn't look like it's made with crayola!
I like this part of the post...
Quote:
Matt Cutts: Well, when I visit www.example.com I get map of the world and then at the bottom of the page there’s a dropdown to select which country version of Example to go to next.
Webmaster: Right. Example is a big business with lots of different country-level domains, so we have to ask the user where they want to go. Why, is that a problem?
Matt Cutts: It sort of is. Dropdown boxes and forms are kind of like a dead end for search engine spiders. Historically we haven’t crawled through them.
Webmaster: But it’s just a dropdown box with ten countries listed. You can’t just crawl that?
Matt Cutts: Not really. Think of search engine spiders much like small children. They go around the web clicking on links. Unless there’s a link to a page, it can be hard for a search engine to find out about that page.
Webmaster: But it’s just ten countries. Couldn’t the search engine just pick one of those values and keep going?
Matt Cutts: In theory you could do that, but in practice the major search engines don’t usually do that.
Webmaster: That sucks. I like how clean the page looks. Is there a way around that?
Matt Cutts: Sure. You could put the list of countries at the bottom of the page and make them hyperlinks so that Googlebot can crawl through to the other urls
Taking that as an example..what's the difference if you are a small child when it comes to CSS - do small children know what the difference is between a CSS link and a non-CSS link???
James.
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The thing is its not the links which are CSS the links are coded as normal links. The CSS is simpley there to make the sub menu part not visable until you hover over the main menu catagory.
My advise to you if you are not able to do a CSS dropdown menu that looks good is simple, learn some CSS.
Matt Cutts - Can Google crawl your website?
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