PCInk - 3:46 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

No that won't block it. Your server will include the file (say index.shtml), send it back to the spider and the spider will index the full file (index.shtml has not been excluded by robots.txt). The spider knows nothing about the includes, as your server did it prior to 'despatch'.

Client side is one of the few possibilities, but this is cloaking. Google do not like cloaking and can (and will) drop you out of their index for this tactic.

Some people seem to think that using CSS to position the menu at the location you want, whilst having the drop-down menu code at the end of your html file, will help. I haven't tried this yet, so I could not comment on if it is true. It uses the assumption that search engines give more weight to words higher up on the html code and that they only index the first fixed amount of the code, ignoring the end of the code.