Will spiders follow form/jump urls?

[JeremyL]

I wasn't sure where to post this but I figured I would post it here as googles the most important. Will Google and all other SE spiders follow url's in drop down menu forms? Or do they actually have to see a <a href=""> tag?

Thanks

[korkus2000]

I have heard it said that google will find all "http://" on a page link or no link, but I don't know. Googlebot is very agressive. I would create a text navigation of your jump links somewhere else on the page to make sure they will be grabbed and spidered.

[papabaer]

I'm not certain how things stand now, though I did have several pages that used js drop-down menus and it was not until I added pages from the menu to a simple, text-link sitemap, that they were finally picked up by Google.

I believe korkus2000 is right in suggesting that Googlebot is an aggressive and capable spider; it appears that pages that might've been previously unaccessible becuase of link method are now being spidered.

I'd love to here some more opinions though.

[Key_Master]

Yes, Googlebot will follow those links.

[Mark Candiotti]

(I've reposted this from another discussion hoping to generate a few more responses in this continually recurring topic. Sorry if anyone saw it somewhere else.)

What do you think about Dreamweaver's "Go To URL" behaviour which looks like this:

<img src="../picture-green-apples.gif" width="40" height="20" onMouseDown="MM_goToURL('parent','../order-green-apples.htm');return document.MM_returnValue">

Do you think Googlebot could, or better yet, WOULD follow the internal URL "../order-green-apples.htm" by virtue of the ".htm" much in the way as supposed above that the spider may follow "anything with ["...] in it?

I'm not interested in using javascript for external links, only internal ones. Thanks.