Dropdown Menus - can they hurt ranking on Google?

[liamgt]

Can dropdown navigation menus detrimentally affect rankings on google?

im trying to get a definitive answer on this one. I currently have a site with 2 drop down menus at the top, 1 is for brands of which there are around 30 choices and one is for all products that we sell (about 200). I have one group of people telling me our rankings are not as high as we would like them because these 2 menus are being viewed as spammy by google and another advisor telling me that the links cant be accessed by google and wont affect our rankings.

So my question is because there is a lot of menu code to get to before the actual page text comes in, is this going to hurt us in google?

thanks for any replies in advance

liam

[tedster]

The presence of lots of source code before the content is much less of a ranking problem than it used to be. Still, it makes me uncomfortable and it certainly doesn't help you at all.

You can use CSS positioning to place the "code pile" at the end of the source code but still have it display where you need it to on the page. Another approach is to place those dropdowns in an iframe. Then the source code is on a different url and not interfering at all.

Even with the CSS solution (often called 'source-ordered content") if all those links are visible to googlebot, you might run into the problems we are discussing in this thread: The "Mega Menu" Problem and Google Rankings [webmasterworld.com]. You mention 200 product links - that is overboard, IMO.

[lorax]

Are these CSS drop downs or HTML select/option drop downs?

While the bots can follow a form submission, they won't necessarily pass the variables and get the correct result. You may have a form action of handler.asp. The bots will find and attempt to call handler.asp but the last I knew, they wouldn't attempt to pass the values from your form fields.

And I totally agree with Ted re: too many items in your drop down list.

[liamgt]

Not sure what sort of dropdown it is, below is a sample of the code with one option for the dropdown with actual choices removed.

<li><p>Store Search: </p></li>
<li>
<select name="searchbrand" onchange="document.SearchForm.submit();">
<option value="">Select Brand</option>
<option value="122364">Choice 1</option><option value="131048">Choice 1</option>
</select>
</li>

[liamgt]

I understand that there may be too many choices, however as we have a site map im more concerned with code versus text, however as its an ecommerce site we need to look at functionality as well as ranking! Thanks for any input so far guys.

[lorax]

You're using HTML select/option drop downs. Do as Ted suggests and use CSS to push the code below the content. Also make sure your site map uses links to get to the same pages that the form and form handler would take someone to. At the very least.

[liamgt]

thaks for the replys people!