Drop down box passing values is not being crawled

Need crawler to index unique drop down box

[Insomniac]

I have a set of drop down boxes that are responsible for a considerable amount of site navigation. These drop down boxes pass values such as 'ca' for state etc. These values are passed to a php script which then queries a mysql database.

Box 1: [somedomain.com...]
Box 2: [somedomain.com...]

Currently none of our pages are being crawled since the drop down boxes pass values and not hard links. I have created a site map with hard links and I'm waiting for the next crawl. Also, the link to the site map is in the footer which is a php include.

Will this affect spiders from seeing the sitemap?

What is the best method to get my pages crawled properly?

[le_gber]

hello Insomniac and Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

What you did with the sitemap was the best thing to do. Your links seems to be spiderable (there is a debate on the number of variables supported by search engines but having one or two seems to ork fine)

As for the php include it will return normal html (if you check your page source code in your browser you don't see the include code but the proper html one). So it will be find ok during the next crawl.

Leo

[Insomniac]

Thanks Leo.

My main concern is that only values are being passed such as 'ca' and not absolute links like, www.somedomain.com/statesearch?stateID=CA.

Google will only see the 'ca' and never crawl the page.

[le_gber]

In your sitemap have you created links like
statesearch?stateID=CA
statesearch?stateID=TX
etc...

If you did it should follow them and see the result page with the appropriate data.

Leo

[Arnett]

I have a drop down menu forms in the home page of my new site that branch directly to urls. Will Google and other spiders crawl these? Until I know for sure I am using both the drop down menu forms,actual html links in the home page and a sitemap also.

[le_gber]

I am not sure they can follow the links from the drop down but google seems to try to support javascript liking as long as there is full url for the link.

The text links are still the better option to have your site spidered (wwheter they are on the pages or on the sitemap.)

Leo