drop down forms/menu and google bot

[ken72]

Hi guys,

I think I heard people say search engines dont like frames, java etc. but how about drop down forms. I have a drop down menu with over 300 items for users to choose from right at the start of my webpage. Is this a negative when it comes to getting a good ranking.

Kindest regards,

Ken

[jady]

Ken,

We have found that sometimes this presents a problem. Out simple soultion, to ensure the whole site gets indexed - is a simple text-link based sitemap. Might want to take this route as well to be "safer".

Best of luck!

[Digimon]

That kind of menus are not a problem for rankings if you keep your important content accessible through other ways. That links are not followed by SE. You can use them but you have also to set up other ways to find those pages.
Hope it helps.
regards

PD: The sitemap method is a good one but I would advice more than just one internal link to every page you want to get well ranked and much more keyword rich links than sitemaps use to be.

[Eric_Jarvis]

we have a site based round an index page with a form menue...we have a link to a page with a text link version beside the menu not only for search engines, but also as a fall back position for browsers that can't handle the menu...I was under the impression that this was standard practise...it's certainly the only way I know of to ensure 100% accessibility

[ken72]

Thank you for your help guys. The form actually works a MYSQL database which I dont mind if the datbase is not indexed. My Question is really if I want the page with the form to rank well (it is my home page) is there some way of tell the search engine to ignore the drop down menu which contains about 300 names of countries. Or does Search engines ignore forms anyway.

[Digimon]

I'm sure they ignore it anyway

[ciml]

ken72:
> ...is there some way of tell the search engine to ignore the drop down menu...

Can you exclude that part of the site with a /robots.txt file?

It has been reported that if the page has full URIs (eg. http://www.yourdomain.com/thepage.html) then Googlebot might crawl them.