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A site that I am building will have sub-menus, which are hidden until a user put his mouse on a link, but I need to make sure that the site will be crawled properly and do not want to be penalize for this.
Thanks for your help.
If you're using a CSS technique, such as a :hover effect which changes the list's visibility or display properties, you should be fine. SE spiders don't render your CSS when they view the page; it's just raw rendered source. So all that fancy CSS frippery doesn't hide things to the spider.
If, however, your content is being hidden and revealed via some form of javaScript, you might be in trouble. Just as spiders don't read into the CSS, they also don't read into the content of a script, which means any content (links, text, etc) that is inside the script is invisible to the spider.
Note, however, that javaScript which is used to change the CSS properties mentinoed above is likely to be safe.
The main thing to look at, whatever method you use, is whether or not the links in question are part of the page's raw, HTML source code. If they're right there, but hidden by some external means, you're safe. If they aren't right there (due to being generated on the fly by a script, etc), chances are it's a bum method.
There are a number of SE spider simulators that can show you just what your page looks like to a spider. One of the best around is actually very close by... [searchengineworld.com...]
Run the page through. If you can see the links, so can the spider.
cEM
