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My question is:
I want to include slider menus on the left hand side of all my web pages on my site, but i have been told having slider menus creates problems when the search engines crawl your site. My question is, all the pages that have slider menus in them do they get omitted by the search engines, or is this not correct and something else happens? If someone can provide some info or point me in the right direction i would be very greatful! Thanks
However there is a clear distinction between those menus that are in areas of the html which are manipulated by Javascript (e.g. menus sliding out) or the menus where the links themselves are constructed through the use of Javascript.
The former is OK, the latter is unfriendly. So the answer to your question depends on what is happening in the menu.
Note: some commercial menu scripts are also extremely "heavy" (which would tend to be unfriendly to the user and possibly to the search engine) - others are very light and can be placed in an external script.
BTW, welcome to WW.
You're getting good answers from both stever and tbear. If you want your links to be followed by spiders and to pass along PageRank in Google, then somewhere you should have a link to each page that looks like this:
<a href="page.html"></a>
Although some spiders will attempt to follow any character string that looks like it might be a URL (even if it appears within a script or a form element) it's not clear that such "URL-following" is the same as ordinary crawling. That is, will those URLs also pass along PR on Google, or actually "count as a link" in the algorithms of other search engines. It doesn't look like it does right now.
If the particular "slider" menu you want to use will not easily accept a straight HTML link, you can add a regular HTML link in the footer of your page, and perhaps in a site map. The spider won't altogether abandon a validly coded page just because there is some javascript on it. However, do make sure the HTML is valid [validator.w3.org].
However, the question of usability is immense. In my testing, removal of a dHTML drop-down or sliding menu has always inmproved site stats. In a recent case, the removal more than TRIPLED the site's stickiness metrics.
My gut feeling is that dHTML menu systems are often an excuse for not planning the site's information architecture well. And even with a good IA, the general "geeky" feel they have does not work for the user whose mind-set is not agreeable with hierarchical thinking.
The best summary I can give for the situation is that well designed dHTML menu systems may work OK for regular, return visitors to your site - especially technically oriented visitors - but they scare the daylights out of many first time visitors who will never come back unless they absolutely must for some reason. And even then, many will keep their use of the site as minimal as possible.
You can read my post about the issues here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
